A Beginner’s Guide to Fossil Language
2026 · Text, installation · Book 21 × 21 cm, flashcards 8.5 × 6 cm
A constructed language for speaking towards the non-human world. It has no tense. Time moves at the speed of whatever is speaking.
There are five domains: humans and animals, plants and fungi, rocks and earth, waters and fire and air, celestial bodies. Pronouns and verbs carry the domain of the speaker, and the time markers carry its speed. A tree grows a ring where a human takes a step. Death is one way a being changes domain. Dissolution is another.
A human can say that they die and become a plant, since bodies do become soil. To say that they imagine it takes the marker -im, which belongs only to the human class and states that the crossing has not happened. It names the distance.
The work is a book and a set of printed flashcards, each carrying an example sentence. The flashcards are meant to be taken away.
- Supermarket Art Fair, Stockholm, 2026
ran ra-mor nan na-lum-hurn We die and become plants, growing in ring-time. (A human becomes soil becomes root.)
ran ra-mor-im nan We imagine dying into plants.
fan fa-daru-trar-ia nalu We sand and trees form strata together. (We and trees form sediment.)