International Day of Languages: September 26, 2024

Celebrating the International  Day of Languages.

September 26 is the International Day of Languages, an event established in 2001 by the Council of Europe to enhance linguistic diversity, encourage multilingualism, and raise awareness of the value of diversity and coexistence. Languages are an invaluable foundational resource, an individual and collective heritage that preserves cultural richness, fosters dialogue, and encourages mutual understanding among people and nations. As both codified cognitive systems and structures of identity belonging, languages are the main tools of communication and dialogue, and simultaneously bridges, borders, and sometimes walls. The Day was founded based on this sensitivity and awareness, seeking to celebrate all the languages used in Europe, including those used less widely and those of migrants. A project and at the same time a tribute starting from living matter that feeds on the exchange and circulation of projects and ideas.

Languages are an irreplaceable cultural resource, a collective heritage to be defended and preserved. Yet above all, they are the resource for multicultural dialogues seeking knowledge and understanding between peoples and nations, between generations, and between knowledge and disciplines.

Their centrality has been made even more manifest with the globalization of markets for skills and experiences: in a world that has suddenly become competitive, selective, and interconnected, they have redefined access, exclusion, and inclusion. The ability to communicate has become essential for social capital as well as human and professional development, an asset of cultural mediation that stimulates cohesion and promotes inclusive visions, mutual respect, and evolved and emancipated citizenship policies. Therefore, having established a dedicated day not only encourages learning but invites reflection on the value of languages, on the protection of those spoken, those that are not widespread and have become minorities, and those influenced by the metamorphoses of modernity.

Value systems are thus called upon to govern many levels of complexity - that of the word, of the syntax and semantic architecture underlying writing, that of the graphic sign which connotes the alphabet as a system of representation, including visual representation. Letters, symbols, characters, and punctuation are conduits transmitting thoughts and ideas; they are not technical means, nor exclusively formal codes, but cultural vehicles that make human thought manifest and offer it to the world.

Civilizations have developed unique writing systems throughout history, each of which records the knowledge of an era and constitutes a heritage that increases the stock of understanding in human history. Graphic signs and calligraphy are visual languages capable of transcending the very language barriers that generated them, allowing communication to cross time and space. Throughout history, art has exercised and questioned the mystery and evocative power of these archaic and radical signs, making it possible to relate the earliest cave signs to computer scripts that contain a secret harmony, with potential for multiple, cross-cutting, and multidisciplinary interpretations.

Just as languages evolve to adapt to contexts and thus interpret their own time, so too do graphic signs transform, find new applications, and become contaminated by disciplines and research, from design to architecture and on to a wide variety of contemporary artistic expressions.

Words, signs, and alphabets - between didactic forms and progressive transfigurations - have also become patterns and new visual, cognitive, and symbolic structures. Starting from living matter that confronts the reality of communities in perpetual change.

A pattern is a text that tells a story: the lines, geometric figures and structures that compose it are letters in an alphabet of elementary units with repeating rules, proportions, and reiterations capable of communicating ideas, emotions, and meanings nonverbally. Their extraordinary ability to adapt to different contexts, to be comprehensible, declutterable, and iconic, makes them devices of thought and quotation. Their evolution reflects the continuous transformation of visual communication and its ability to adapt to contexts while keeping its connection to tradition intact.

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PROSPETTIVA CENTRALE - ALBERONERO

Enveloping and challenging in its restlessness, it draws nearer and farther. It reassures the lucid layout and interrogates the gap that shifts the center of vision at every glance. “Prospettiva Centrale” contains all the matrices of Alberonero's training and artistic practice, his sensibility that tirelessly migrates from sculpture to drawing to painting to performance, and his aptitude for creating perfect, ordered visual systems. To govern chance? To pay homage to harmony? To seek similarities? The tapestry of Alberonero - an artist who works on landscape transformations and transitional processes related to perceptual feeling - is an optical illusion, a workaround, a vanishing point, a rational construction using thread as an elementary particle of geometry. The perspective of the different planes and the rapture of one’s gaze in the center of the work are a formal and linguistic virtuosity that naturally cites language as semantic challenges, edification of hidden meanings, and dialogue between reality and perception. Lending itself to multiple points of view and observation, the work is an open system, an access, an opening, and a possibility that seeks contact with the surface while moving away from it, in a jubilation of chromatic and spatial differences, a subversion between distances, between near and far. The diagonals made with wire, potential stretches of those urban installations that characterize Alberonero's research at different scales and success, are the unit of measure and the stylistic cipher of the construction, they prepare the depth of the gaze and perhaps its ultimate essence. The virtuosity in this work puts signs and punctuation in sync with the geometric syntax of proportions and drawing. The work embodies a high level of complexity in the cohabitation of languages, in the relativism of understanding that slips and transforms according to points of view, light, and the relationship with the surface acting as a platform for dialogue.

Is there perhaps a better metaphor to remind us of the need for the Day of Languages as a challenge for communities, and as momentum toward greater and better knowledge of things and people, worlds, and cultures?

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