TRANSIT POINT
620cmx345cm | found doors | windshield motors | motor drivers | raspberry pie | JavaScript programming | and other various materials | 2023
The work Transit Point addresses my geo-lingual identity. The work also aims to respond to the rapidly developing lingua franca in Kenya, Sheng´. Sheng´ is a local slung, primarily a mix of English and Swahili, and other local vernacular embeddings spoken among the youths in Kenya. The work explores the concept of language, particularly the lingua franca as a junction point where multiculturalism and multilingualism collide. The project looks at vibrant linguistic environments and raises questions about where doors of communication open and where they close, therefore examining the potential of mixing different languages, but also the exclusivity that can come along with language policies (e.g., bureaucratic borders in the German language). The work consists of doors collected from different parts of Hamburg. The six doors are connected to layers of 20cm apart 4m long rails, both mounted onto the ceiling cutting across an empty room. With the use of powered motors, these doors are programmed to automatically slide from one end of the rail to the other while overtaking in different intervals in the middle of the room to simulate multi-railway tracks at Hamburg HBF. These doors are supposed to represent dynamic household structures that form unique patterns of being among the housed persons as an expression of diverse lingual communities that I am familiar with through the languages I speak, namely Luo, Swahili, Sheng, Kikuyu, English, and bit of German. The idea of the project developed after an encounter with another Luo speaker on a train in Hamburg that identified me due to the language as a “jadhot” (literal meaning: a person of one`s own door,) a word used among Luo people away from home. This sparked the idea to use doors as a way of representing language visually, and not by audio sound medium. Transit point projects Sheng' as a linguistic collage of languages among its code switchers.
Photo courtesy of Tim Albrecht & Charlotte Spiegelfeld