Mamal
2018
Letterpress, riso print
Letterpress, riso print
Sin U Leong, Alexis Demetriades, Kai-Ning Huang, Yilin Wang, Daisy Buckle, Minna Virkki
This hand-bound visual/textual collaborative publication is exploring the hidden/latent/emerging relationships between word(s) and image.
The first word that most people around the world say is some variation of ‘mama'. All words evolve and diverge over time, but ‘mama’ has remained stable to millennia, the world over. This is because ‘ma’ is the first sound that babies can physically make. It is a word that forms a link between biology and culture. There is a wave of xenophobia and nationalism creeping across the world, and this word challenges the basic tenets of these movements. It stresses that we all have this word in common, and it is, for the most part, reflective of a loving bond between people. So we are mammals, but we are also mammals.
The first word that most people around the world say is some variation of ‘mama'. All words evolve and diverge over time, but ‘mama’ has remained stable to millennia, the world over. This is because ‘ma’ is the first sound that babies can physically make. It is a word that forms a link between biology and culture. There is a wave of xenophobia and nationalism creeping across the world, and this word challenges the basic tenets of these movements. It stresses that we all have this word in common, and it is, for the most part, reflective of a loving bond between people. So we are mammals, but we are also mammals.
This book is a collection of such invented terms, offering words for phenomena which have been sensed but not named.
A writer is compelled to craft new words in order to avoid both silence and persecution.
A word '(G)Alarming' stands for 'global warming'. It is designed to slip past censors in Donald Trump’s war on scientific evidence and terminology related to climate change.
A writer is compelled to craft new words in order to avoid both silence and persecution.
A word '(G)Alarming' stands for 'global warming'. It is designed to slip past censors in Donald Trump’s war on scientific evidence and terminology related to climate change.