Lebabbabel

The city has many invisible boundaries — language is one of them. When we walk in the street, stand in the subway, or sit in a restaurant, some foreign languages always reach our ears. Stuttgart is a city where almost half of the inhabitants come from somewhere else. Different languages construct dynamic boundaries on the map.

For this project, I collected 30 different languages that people speak in Stuttgart. Namely, I recorded the speakers speaking the same sentence “We are here, we were here, we will be here” in their mother tongues. Combining their voices in my sound work, the recordings demonstrate the hidden boundaries in an urban interstice.