My Name is Language – Nicoline van Harskamp

Central to this book are scripts for the video work PDGN and the series of staged works titled My Name Is Language. Speech is the medium and the main topic of both of these works, that treat names as spoken language rather than spelled identity markers. A scholar of literary arts and performance culture, Avishek Ganguly reflects in his essay “Global Englishes, Rough Futures” on questions of translation, incomprehension, and untranslatability in van Harskamp’s work. The book also includes a list of text-change algorithms that van Harskamp calls “distorters” and an excerpt from Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) by Marge Piercy.

Fixed in corporate and state systems more firmly than numeric tax IDs or IP addresses, names are generally no longer treated as language, but as lexically opaque formulas. In their indifference to language diversity, authorities are known to rephrase, reorder, and re-alphabetize names when they don’t fit their administrative standard. They are also known to deny rights to people who have no “name label.”

In the fictive worlds represented in this book, society is not centralized, not oversized, and self-naming is brought forward as a form of self-empowerment and resistance.

First part of Achim Lengerer/Scriptings’ reader series Political Scenarios which aims to publish carefully selected scripts and texts by artists that refer neither to academic forms nor to purely literary forms of writing, but rather embed “text” as a fully integral part of contemporary political and visual art practice.

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ISBN 978-3-948212-39-1

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ISBN 978-3-947295-61-6

More Political Scenarios books at Scriptings

Names can cross cultural boundaries in ways that most other words cannot, but they can also suffer damage along the way. Mispronounced, garbled, even replaced completely with something more acceptable to the dominant culture, they can start to lead a life of their own.

Fixed in corporate and state systems more firmly than numeric tax ID’s or IP addresses, names are generally no longer treated as language but as lexically opaque formulas. In their indifference to language diversity, authorities are known to rephrase, re-order and re-alphabetize names when they don’t fit their administrative standard. They are also known to deny rights to people without a stable name label.

In this series of works, names are treated as spelled and translatable identity markers as well as spoken word.

For ‘My Name is Language’ Nicoline spoke with hundreds of people about the role of names in their – private and professional – lives. Always starting with the same questions: “What is your name?” “Who gave it to you?” “What does it mean in language?” these conversations led to intimate observations about how names are affected by the power struggles within politics, religion, education and kinship systems.

In history, women have lost their names after marriage or childbirth; traveling peoples have adapted the suffixes in their names according to the language of the territory they were in; non-German diacritics have mostly been banned under Nazism; names imposed by colonizing forces have been reappropriated by the Basque, the Kurds, the Urhobo and the Irish alike.

These stories are retold by performers in the waiting rooms of bureaucratic institutions, places where names are in actuality collected, filed, inflicted, withdrawn, or adapted, such as a civil registry office and a municipal housing authority. In these performance works, listeners are mixed in with the speakers, none of whom uses the same (variety of) language. Names appear not only in spoken form, but also in writing and in translation on information screens overhead.

The piece was first commissioned as by steirischer herbst Graz and Project Arts Centre Dublin in 2018. In 2019 an edition was produced for the Ruhr Ding festival, and installed for 2 months in the waiting area of the monumental Rathaus Oberhausen. New live editions were produced for the Museum for Contemporary Art in Antwerpen (2020) and the Amsterdam Museum (2021). A video installation was produced for Museum Het Valkhof in Nijmegen (2022). Between each edition, script overlaps exist, but most monologues were written specifically about local topics.