‘Debris’ Spring School: The Bureau of Linguistic Reality
The ‘Debris’ Spring School is an interdisciplinary learning platform that invites students and researchers to collectively explore socio-environmental challenges through the theme of debris. Join us to reflect on the socio-material implications of what is discarded, forgotten, or misplaced—whether as physical waste, abandoned ideas, or untold stories. By addressing debris as both a metaphor and a material reality, the Spring School interrogates how power dynamics, inequality, and systemic neglect shape the accumulation and management of what society casts aside.
Research domain Civic And Policy Design and The Doctoral School invite you to be part of two hybrid keynotes and workshops with The Bureau of Linguistic Reality (USA) artists and the architect, educator and writer Sepideh Karami (UK). You are also welcome to join us for coffee and cake the first day, a collective dinner the second day and a half-day trip to Modave for the Spring School’s open day and barbeque.
You can sign up for one or all events using the registration link.
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The Bureau of Linguistical Reality: Wayfinding through words
The Bureau of Linguistical Reality will open Spring School: Debris with a short art performance in the form of an academic lecture wherein we present our findings to date in investigating the way language shapes culture(s) and how changes are needed in our language(s) to address the polycrisis of our time. After the short performance, we will break into two groups where participants collaborate to identify the unnamed feelings, experiences and phenomena they lack the words to describe. Together, they will attempt to name these phenomena, generating new language to give voice to our individual and collective experiences.
As an artwork focused on the power of individuals to name their personal experience of the climate crisis and how such action can inform the collective body, The Bureau’s focus is on highlighting the unknown and unnamed experience of the climate crisis.
Participants are encouraged to continue to allow the emerging vocabulary to continue to evolve and expand throughout the rest of the week's programming.
About The Bureau of Linguistical Reality
The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is a participatory artwork by artists Heidi Quante and Alicia Escott, who collaborate with the public to identify a collective loss of words to describe the emotions and experiences our species is having as our climate changes. Recognising that just as new maps will need to be drawn as climate change accelerates, new experiences will likewise need to be codified in language to recognise our new collective realities, asking, “Who has the agency to define the world around us - and the words we use to talk about it?” The Bureau creates a unique space for people to identify feelings and experiences they do not have the language to describe and collaboratively coin neologisms to better discuss these issues. The Bureau is a process-based social practice artwork that uses conversation, place-making and facilitating cross-pollination between fields as a medium in itself. The Bureau sees the words created in this process as points of connectivity to further understanding, dialogue and conversations in the world about the ideas these words seek to codify.
Writing about The Bureau of Linguistical Reality has been published in Smithsonian Magazine, The BBC, The New Yorker, The Economist, KQED, The San Francisco Chronicle, Vice Magazine, and others. The Bureau was the recipient of the Kindle Projects Makers Muse Award and its Mobile Field Office has traveled Nationally and Internationally including to Santa Barbara Museum of Contemporary Art, Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive (BAMFA), La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris, Blackwood Gallery at The University of Toronto in Canada, The Berkeley Art Center, Southern Exposure, The Contemporary Jewish Museum, The Exploratorium, and The Interval at The Long Now all in San Francisco.
Date and location:
- Monday May 19th
- 15h00: Meet and greet with coffee and cakes
- 16h00 - 19h00: The Bureau of Linguistical Reality
- faculteit Architectuur en Kunst, Agoralaan, Gebouw E, 3590 Diepenbeek (room E-B20)
Registration
- You can register via this Google Form
- Spots are limited to 20 people - first come, first served
- For PhD students and postdocs, we would like to draw your attention to the cancellation and no-show policy of UHasselt
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