Public Programme | 3.12.22 | Manifold Books (NL)

The second event in the Between Four Walls public programme, our words as space as language was a conversation-as-performance between artists Kees van Leeuwen and Andrea Knezović. The conversation invited the audience to question and meander along with Knezović and van Leeuwen’s thoughts, annotations, doubts and propositions, dwelling on the intersection between language, spatiality, neurodiverse sensibilities, and the negotiation of knowledge exchange in the midst of all such circumstances.

The conversation departed from the questions: in what ways do we negotiate as much ourselves as the world around us through language? How otherwise may language materialise, both within and beyond verbal processes? Can one’s somatic sensibilities fecundate a language, and can space —that which surrounds and holds one together— be understood as universal syntax? When faced with an expanded conception of language, what happens to the mythos of certainty? If there is knowledge in the unspeakable, what other thought styles and systems can we nurture, in an effort to support a sustainable psycho-cultural dynamic?

our words as space as language also functioned as a prelude to Resonant match, Manifold Books’ 2023 program, which related ‘resonance,’ to a variety of phenomena, particularly to dialogue, language and translations.

Image credit: collage of Andrea Knezović’s The Mess we come to love (2021) & extract from Kees van Leeuwen’s series Objects are Spaces (2013 – present).