In a diorama of an abstract desert, a young girl is speaking her mother tongue – Hebrew. Her words sound like music, as she describes the place she calls home: it’s hot there, and full of history.
In Aleph, artist Ana Wild offers the learning of a new language to her audience. Starting with simple and concrete things, word by word she builds an increasingly complex lexicon of sound, movement and layered meaning. Learning a language demands opening oneself to another culture, other histories. Here, Ana speaks Hebrew directly to the audience, supported by a projected English translation. Watching, reading and listening, the audience is actively engaged in the acquisition of embodied language, and all the inherited problematics that come with it. Ana is talking about mother-language, about landscape, weather, body and inheritance. In a poetic and playful manner she leads us through cultural ideas and contagious ideology, treading the line between hopelessness and courage. In Aleph she presents herself in the guise of a trickster, a young-girl, battling against the Aleph, the giant, with its own weapon: language itself.
