JE BENT DE MEER VOUDIGE TAAL — TU ES LA LANGUE PLURIELLE

dora garcía

A wall sculpture by Dora García, based on the verses of Sabah Zouein. The sculpture reflects the melancholy tone that García encountered in both the commune of Forest as the poetry of Zouein. García put a selection of Zouein's verses on the façade of the sports hall. She left out letters here and there, though the text is still legible thanks to the traces of glue left on the concrete. Passers-by can read the verses in French, Dutch and Arabic. In doing so, García refers to the former brewery facing the sports hall. Once a splendid building, it has been left abandoned for decades and most of the gilded letters of the inscription "Wielemans Ceuppens" have fallen off.

Inspired by her talks with Zouein on the tense situation between religious communities in her homeland, García created a special walking tour guide.

In Seuils/Drempels, García invited the residents of Vorst to discover an unfamiliar side of their borough. This original guide lists all the buildings in which a community meets for spiritual purposes: it is a walk that takes you to churches, temples, mosques, synagogues, ritual bathhouses and so on. The guide also contains poems by Sabah Zouein about Vorst; in the original Arabic version they can be read from right to left. The guide combines these two reading directions: the western direction for the spiritual locations and the Arabic direction for the poems.

1000 free copies of Seuils/Drempels were distributed in the borough of Vorst in the spring of 2009.

activities

In May 2008 the Lebanese poet Sabah Zouein and the Spanish artist Dora García met in Vorst. They walked around the neighbourhood with about twenty residents. In her poem, Zouein described images that struck her in the course of her walks. She also deals with her inner turmoil regarding the situation in her native country. Inspired by Zouein's stories, García put together a guidebook for a walk around all the spiritual spots in the borough. García also created a permanent structure 'jij bent de meervoudige taal'/'tu es la langue plurielle'. In association with local groups, Het beschrijf organised a series of rap and slam workshops for the neighbourhood youths. The ‘Echoes' exhibition at Wiels showed poetry and art by the inhabitants.

the artist

Dora Garcia is a Spanish artist who lives in Barcelona and who lived in Brussels at the time of her collaboration with Vers Brussel. At the heart of her work lies the relationship between artist, work of art and public, and its nature is somewhere between performance, text and installation. She typically uses such varied media as drawings, photos, site-specific installations, performance, video, sound, net art and words. Language always plays an important part, both as a means of communication and as a system of coded signs. Garcia often works in public space; for her ambitious Inserts in real time project she created a series of ten performances in which actors carried out her instructions.