Cecilie Fang

Language , Ghost word , sculpture , to write , Publication , process , performance , installation ,Experimental , Economy , crossover , Conceptual , sculpting , Autobiographical , Artistic research , Abstract

Read aloud

Within my work, I work with language as both material and structure: Instead of seeing language as a medium of communication, I approach it as something that accumulates, circulates, and is governed. Growing up between Mandarin, English, and Danish made me aware that language is never simply spoken; it is inherited, negotiated, and shaped by the worlds through which it moves.

Working across installation, performance, publication, and material micro-performativity, I use material processes as a method of research. Rust oxidizes, salt crystallizes, fungi grow, water circulates, and sound reverberates according to their own temporalities. This way of working with organic materials intersects with how I am interested in the material histories embedded within words. Languages travel alongside trade, extraction, bureaucracy, and technologies of governance. Whether working with salt and its relation to maritime trade and pidgin languages, dust collected from language institutions, or processes of decomposition, I all in all explore how words carry traces of the worlds that produced them. Here, I am drawn to the misread, the untranslated, and the asemic as spaces where linguistic hierarchies begin to loosen and other forms of understanding become possible.

**at the end of the sentence, it rotted** - The installation consists of abstractions of writing systems that, through the asemic, speculated on alternative forms of languaging—and what it means to be unable to speak. Within the installation, language appears as form: strokes and phonetics detached from meaning. This relationship—an asemic one—becomes a starting point for reimagining how meaning is embodied and communicated. Water is pumped into the pond and reversed every four hours, performing a slow transformation where rust accumulates and biomaterial decays. A live soundscape, programmed as an evolving ecosystem, sonifies the writing strokes, reproducing them in cycles resembling mold and microbial life. When language defines who is included and who is not, 'at the end of the sentence, it rotted' seeks a pre- or post-language rooted in affect, in decay, and in the body. Locating resistance in unlearning fluency, the work turns to the rot and the misread as a ground for speculative speech.

**I presumed possession, my language, my loss** - In 'I presumed possession, my language, my loss', I begin in third person to write about what it means to lose a mother tongue, and about how that loss is never natural but engineered: by state assessments, border conditions, and a free market of articulation. I write about language as transaction—what you gain in the language of power at the cost of becoming inarticulate in the language of origin. I write about the monolingual paradigm as a political demand rather than a natural inheritance, about standardization as a form of border-drawing, and about the grievance of hearing the people you love measured as insufficient. The text moves between the personal and the structural, between a grandmother forgetting and a language policy forbidding. It is about what we lose, and about what we have learned to accept as acceptable to lose.

**Currencies** - 'Currencies' is an installation exploring the shifting relationships between trade, language, and value through the history of salt. The work draws from the Yangpu Ancient Salt Field in China and consists of a series of salt stones filled with Dutch seawater. Over the course of the exhibition, the water evaporates and crystallization begins to make visible the slow processes of linguistic erosion and trade. Salt moved along trade routes that also carried languages, dialects, and systems of meaning. 'Currencies' looks at how this material exchange led to semantic shifts—how the circulation of salt intersected with the formation of pidgin languages: simplified grammars developed between speakers with no shared language, often within the conditions of trade and colonization.

**(Despite) Attachments** - Dust collected from the integration exam center in Amsterdam, suspended in alcohol, stored in glass, on galvanized steel, in a drawer. The title partly refers to Ann Laura Stoler's account of imperial governance, a system that has always operated through the administration of attachment and management of affect. One of its current forms is the language integration exam, in which the body is asked to perform in exchange for the right to stay. Empire is not a finished event. It is an ongoing condition, sustained through its institutions and procedures, and reproducing a longer history of extracting and classifying living entities into transferable commodities. Tincturing has historically been used to isolate botanical essence for European imperial science and commerce. Set against this continuum, the work applies tincturing to the institution itself as both method and problem, extending the same logic it seeks to trouble.

It starts in your sofa and extends to your throat — **It begins in your bank and extends to your throat** - This text begins with the mishearing of a word. It starts from the place of inconvenience and unravels a hearing not contained within one fixed conversation. A hearing that has been expanded into a writing that begins in your sofa and extends to your throat when its language heard writes itself into and onto the muscles. 'It begins in your bank and extends to your throat' ruminates on how digital algorithms turn words into capital, disciplining language and the body. Its writing explores how search engines link profitability to vocabularies and how productivity dictates posture, raising whether we can separate language and our bodies from economic structures.

Something is stuck in my throat, and I think it is language

Date: 11-02-2026 t/m 11-02-2026

Location: Page Not Found

In association with: Page Not Found and Raquel Coll Juncosa

Moving between reading, script, and conversation, Raquel Coll Juncosa and Cecilie Fang present their recent publications "We live on the razor's edge" and "It begins in your sofa and extends to your throat."

Their works meet around questions of language, finance, power, and theatricality-exploring how economic and linguistic systems pass through voice and body, shaping what can be spoken, withheld, or resisted.

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