qwx and the city

We lost our project qwx and the city because we trusted blindly in the municipality of Diyarbakir. There are no words to describe such a loss and what the citizens of Diyarbakir are going through.

Errorist vs. Deutschlandstiftung

Die von der Deutschlandstiftung Integration im März 2010 begonnene Kampagne "Raus mit der Sprache. Rein ins Leben" verdreht mittels derselben Bildsprache die Anliegen der von errorist bereits 2009 gestarteten Aktion "qwx – show ur lingua". Diese Juxta-Position eröffnet errorist die Möglichkeit einer kritischen Perspektive auf die eindimensional geführte Integrationsdebatte – in einem offenen Brief an die Vorsitzende der Deutschlandstiftung Integration.

Believe in what?

Errorist proudly presents: the revolutionary side of the radical preacher and holy anarchist, who did not shy away from conflict with the churches and reigning order of his day.

qwx-show ur lingua

The online campaign qwx-show ur lingua aims to bring together pictures of people sticking out their tongues in an act of resistance and self assertion on the website qwx2009.org.

The act of sticking out one’s tongue, universally an act of provocation and disobedience, is thus combined with the specific claim of minorities in Turkey for education in their mother tongue and an institutional recognition of their languages. By showing one’s tongue, one’s speech organ, what is silent becomes visible: the inner voice of the own “otherness”.

show your colours

Symbols of the State are familiar symbols, yet combined with foreign signs they become hard to decipher; to whom can they be attributed? In Turkey, Arabic and Kurdish symbols mostly appear with strongly stereotypic connotations. Here, the fusion of "separatist" and "islamist" signs with the holy national symbols creates a new easthetic unit, thus disturbing the onlooker.

The rendering the slogan „ne mutlu türküm diyene“ (happy is he who can call himself a Turk) in another language accentuates the highly exclusive nature of Atatürk’s quote. In its translated form, it can only be decyphered by the relevant minorities and as such, in that moment, a power shift takes place in their favour.

rename diyarbakir

The project deals with the aesthetic dimension of the castration of a language from public space. The aim of the intervention is to label objects in public space with the words used to designate them in Kurdish, Armenian, Arabic or Assyrian. By labelling public space in the language of the other, we aim to disturb the dominant symbolic order. At the same this artistic intervention functions as a strategy to recover what has been lost. Public space becomes a sort of living 3D dictionary.