Transcript

0021 Adelita Husni-Bey: Postcards from the Desert Island

The other two works on show, Postcards from a Dessert Island and 2265, speak to similar subjects in a way because Postcards is based on a workshop that I held in Paris in 2012 and was during the workshop the children involved from the Ecole Vitruve were thinking through similar themes. So for example at one point in the workshop you’ll see two children arriving on the island with a boat, a cardboard boat they made.

And I remember that day very clearly because they decided on their own accord to speak a different language and to invent a language so the other kids couldn’t understand them. So when they arrived on the island a war broke out and they were thinking about how to solve the situation but were sort of unable to in some ways because of the language barrier that they themselves had created and the fact that that barrier to some degrees had led to, that miscommunication had led them to this violent outbreak. And then once they sat down they started to understand that they wanted to include each other in the project and to maybe try to forge a third language that they could all speak together.