back


Nom de guerre
gold, dimensions variable
2013

Naming is a spell cast by humans to conquer and keep at bay the surrounding world. It is a means to establish and maintain hierarchy, a borderline between a subject and an object, a protection from being swallowed by the omnivorous nameless universe. Knowing someone's true name can give others (magical) powers over her; the utterance of one's name can impair or enslave it's bearer. Be it a name of a god, a spirit, a wizard or a warrior, it's better kept secret and unpronounced.

A name officializes the frontier between the self and the other, it fortifies the I and estranges the Them. A name means ownership, it enforces social order through citizen cataloging and institutionalizes our society's obsessive-compulsive classification disorder. It is a fictive fact that keeps us in a lineage and puts us in place, it holds us in constrains of ethnicity, class and gender. It translates us into linguistic objects and confines us into a brand. A name is inherited from ancestors, given by a father or taken from a husband, but it can also be traded or stolen, renounced, denied or chosen.

A "nom de guerre" conveys the liberty of being self-taken, or the merit of being won in battles. It is a way how to alter identity, dissociate from the domestic self and break from the past life. The sculpture titled Nom de guerre is made of golden chains, on which hang small golden initials, usually given to children as presents at baptism or worn by lovers to cherish the name of the beloved. These letters spell "activate amok, not a causal chain", an anagram of our names turned into a poetic appeal to break with causal dependence, shed the contingency of logic and overcome the determinism of language. It invokes the state of an unchained amok, vengeance on the logocentric confinement and calls for a free and brazen existence in the realm of meaninglessness.

In an attempt to fuse creatively with each other, to amalgamate our collaboration and friendship by crossing the onomastic frontline and to conceive a third entity, we mixed all the letters from our names and created a new pseudonym. Heavily based on chance but supported by time-consuming letter shuffling, it opened up a whole chaotic universe of poetry in front of us. The new heteronymic con-fusion marks a self-inspective journey from patronymy to poetry, a sort of kabballistic scrabble with patriarchal nomenclature.

Mathematically, the anagrams are breathtaking - from the 27 letters of our names one can generate 11 octillions of possible permutations. Diving into a horizonless ocean of letter combinations, stumbling upon meaning and modelling words is a play that stretches language within its confines, a sort of linguistic sculpting with limitless possibilities. Through loosing control and dissolving the selves a new (word) chain is created - a leap into the unknown, irrational, random, infinite.