Other Languages. Workshop on Non-Human Writing

One day, crossing a bridge, I looked at the bed of a dry river and realized that the stones, over time, had been marked by water. These traces seemed to be sentences written in an unknown alphabet that the river itself had been writing for centuries.

This workshop invited us to reflect on how nature can generate marks and traces, and thus create a writing without words but full of meaning. This phenomenon is known as “asemic writing”, a kind of language that does not follow any human alphabet, but which becomes another way of communicating. I accompanied the participants to explore our nearby context, where we looked for signs or clues of these non-human writings. Observing elements of our environment, we discovered how over time nature records and reveals an invisible narrative.