A performance-based multilingual typographic workshop with Design students from the Lebanese Fine Arts Academy in Beirut.
With تضاريس / Relief / Tadariss, we explored how flexible letterforms could address linguistic complexity and cultural vernaculars through collaborative improvisation.
Participants created fluid messages shifting constantly between Arabic, French and English, seamlessly moving between Roman and Arabic writing systems, as well as reading directions (left to right and right to left).
The common Lebanese greeting “Hi, Keefak, Ça va?”, combining English, Levantine Arabic and French in a single sentence, became a perfect test phrase. We then explored different ways of writing the word “relief”, identical in French and English, and translated as “Tadariss” in Arabic.
As a group sharing multilingual references, participants extended the potential of wearable letterforms to mirror their generation’s natural code-switching and hybrid everyday speech. These collaborative typographic experiments explored how the fluidity of wearable letterforms could mirror the fluidity of language itself and its ability to constantly adapt between contexts.
Beirut, 2012