ABSTRACT
This chapter presents two ongoing projects where I facilitate collaborative processes to translate, disfigure, and rebuild language. This is accomplished by allowing users access to the digital back-end of web applications and by meeting language where it lives—in social situations. The work in my practice considers language a material and, as such, creates a more direct dialogue with the field of architecture that materializes words with buildings. This artistic research seeks to bring new language into being for complex, liminal, and fluid identities. Language as a grotesque body “in the act of becoming … continually built, created, and build[ing] and creat[ing] another body.” The research is informed by translanguaging as a creative strategy in an attempt to “disinvent named languages” as colonial artifacts.
