Workshop

Despite their Western beginnings, the English language and Latin script have made their home in India, which boasts of the second largest English-speaking population in the world. In our deeply multilingual setting, they act as mediums of translation, and often, common ground, but their foreignness stubbornly endures. In an attempt to disrupt this narrative, participants will collectively speculate what this script might look like if we were to interpret its skeletal forms starting from the formal influence of local Indic systems, like Kannada, Tamil, Bengali or Devanagari, instead of its canonical Western evolution. This idea will be explored by experimenting with writing tools, and drawing Latin script versions of local language signs in a way that centres the visual identity of the original. The workshop will be accompanied by a looping screening of the short film Letter by Letter, as well as a small exhibition of multilingual and multiscriptual street lettering from around India, which will offer elements for the exercise.

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