Jani Rättyä: Teksti tuntemattomalla kielellä

Keywords: public art, language, poem, word, text, immigration, concrete, site specific, prophetic

Text in unknown language, 2004, cut to shape and painted aluminum, Taf taf community art project, Suurpäänkatu 31, Turku

Varissuo is a suburb with the densest concentration of immigrants in Finland and has people from 80 different language groups. My work is dealing with multilingualism and life in the midst of language barriers. As an inspiration to my work I examined speaking in tongues, spiritual phenomenon in which a person produces language-like speech usually consisting of incomprehensible syllables. I produced a speech and transformed it freely to an equivalent written language.

Artist's page

Previous work Next work