“Burning Speech” is articulated within a system composed of different voices, an evocation of political and student assemblies, in which individual speeches alternate with collective discussions and stances. The exhibition questions different perspectives by examining the postures and configurations words can assume in our contemporary landscape: The language of protests, seen as a self-determining field joining together private and communal, able to generate porous community identities and rights; The assembly as an architecture of discourse and gestures, a field for sparking civic and political debates, where conflict can be addressed by playing by democratic rules; The poetry and rhythm of words as a generative agent for a new awareness, removed from production’s economic grids; The performativity which is required in educational and work environments as a modality for attaining objectives, as well as its standardized communicative lexicon, aimed at efficiency and efficacy; The algorithm as a new language, capable of building interest and opinions on social platforms, paired with the current complexity of regulating it in regard to its social, political and privacy implications.

Language is a socio-political device able to shape opinions and conditions in the society we experience as our own community. Speech, or the space of discourse, represents a performative dimension that can’t be neutral, a space where are continually negotiated the conditions of inclusion and exclusion, and where it is possible to inscribe new communal anti-discrimination policies.