Nicoline van Harskamp (Netherlands, 1975) examines structures of power and political resistance, mainly focusing on the use of language and the spoken word and its ability to shape thought. To this end, she uses performances, lectures, films and videos.

Her latest works reveal the constant evolution of language -specifically spoken English- and its inevitable deviation from the established norms by exploring the multiple variations of the English language spoken by people with a different mother tongue.

The work Englishes (2013 - ongoing) is engaged with exploring the widespread use and modification of the English language by its nonnative speakers. Englishes depicts the development of the plurality of spoken English that displaces the perceived position of primacy occupied by dominant strains of the language. The work addresses the political import of this linguistic development, pointing out how our use of language is consistently entrenched in structures of class and power. Challenging these connotations, van Harskamp proposes a dissolution of English into ¿Englishes,¿ co-opting it as a common and ever-growing linguistic resource.

A series of eight episodic films comprising interview, performance, and scripted fiction explore the myriad variations of English spoken between people as a link language. Researched and produced in collaboration with a range of art institutions and universities, each piece broaches a particular area of linguistics such as phonology, pragmatics and translation. The works have directly informed the language predictions represented in the concluding work PDGN (2016).

PDGN is a short fiction video that puts forward an unlikely, but desirable global link language. It portrays a future in which the world is no longer run by national governments or global corporations, and that is neither utopian nor dystopian. The new language is developing between people across the world through voluntary self-instruction. PDGN draws conclusions from previous strands of the Englishes project.

This project was produced by Basis Aktuele Kunst (BAK) in Utrecht and realised with support from the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC). The footage was filmed at the Carthusian Monastery of Seville and the Riotinto mines in Huelva, Spain. Huelva, S

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Photo Album on Flickr.