Working in Languages Spoken by Fewer: An Aesthetics of Non-Alignment

This session examines distinct performative strategies that arise from structural non-alignment between language, aesthetic form, and centres of cultural authority. These conditions open up immanent ecosystems in which multiple artistic forms emerge as parallel worlds.

Working in languages spoken by fewer resists deficit-based framings and positions these languages as generative and artistically productive. From within these conditions, art-and-research collaborators develop alternative aesthetics and become architects of their own epistemic and artistic worlds.

The practice stems from a trajectory including a Hungarian theatre in Romania that developed its own artistic language through adopting Romanian theatre aesthetics, staging Ancient Greek tragedy as deliberate difficulty, and re-imagining Hungarian folk tradition. Later, in Denmark and the UK, it expanded into multilingual workshops, events, performances, and nomadic, international multimedia installations.

As an art-and-research format, Embodied Artistic Research (EAR) contains three interlinked elements: sideways storytelling, collective rituals and ceremonies, and conceptual collective artworks. It functions as a multi-modal incubator for practices that do not align with hierarchical narratives or contexts, and is shaped through co-creative, relational practice.