Latifa Echakhch takes on several Arabic poetic texts in the series of drawings Noises and missing words. Of the original poetry, only the diacritics remain in these ‘transcripts’ in ink. The Arabic script has 28 letters that represent the consonants and long vowels; short vowels are indicated only through these diacritical marks above and below the consonants. In this particular literary context, it are normally exactly these marks that, as linking sounds, give sentences and poems their meaning. Yet here the newspaper sheets remain largely blank. What remains is only the illegible auxiliary sounds, transforming the texts into abstract drawings that hold entirely new interpretations.
Noises and missing words, 2018
Latifa Echakhch’s series of ink drawings deconstructs Arabic poetry. On sheets of newspaper she ‘transcribed’ the original texts, but only copying the punctuation or vowels. Traditionally and linguistically though, in Arabic poetry, these ‘auxiliary signs’ essentially define the meaning for the whole sentence or the poem. Here, the sheets of newspaper are largely left blank, the signs as mere unreadable connotations. The text, in other words, becomes an abstract drawing, bearing within it the possibility of a whole new reading.