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What's What, and What It Might be Reasonable to Do about What's What.
Oxford English dictionary, lysergic acid diethylamide
30 x 20 x 20 cm
2015

Dictionaries are sacred books. They represent infallible authorities of communication. They are scriptures blessed by academias, revered collections of words, regulatory nomenclatural commandments, iconic models of behaviour, conventionally reinforced liturgies of language, cardinals of grammar, clerics of semantics, holy relics of condensed human knowledge, worshiped linguistic codexes of truth.
Despite their solemn sanctity, dictionaries are, on the other hand, very rigid in form and content, narrow and finite, providing limited cognitive abilities, rigorously logocratical, highly derivative, inquisitional towards the heretic fluidity of everyday language, insensitive to the 'buzz' of the words they display.
The canonical Oxford English dictionary soaked in liquid LSD offers a liberation from all norms, education, belief systems and values internalized by people. This tool-book opens here towards new realities, gives space for non-linguistic experiences, dissolves cultural boundaries, touches the ineffable. It plays with both the loss of control and the renunciation of what we believe to know and seek to comprehend through reason. Instead, it expands its potentiality and ventures upon a cognitive shift, a wandering through the maze of our minds in order to attain a state which enables new kinds of knowledge, "new word order", new ways of thinking and acting. 






photo: Alexander Hana
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