Glωssic Isnaf

The project “Glωssic Isnaf” explores the modalities of linguistic boundaries and osmosis in the Ioannina region, focusing on the plural and embodied character of language. Through the study of local myths, fairy tales, songs, oral narratives, literary works, and historical events, it traces the gendered features of language, as well as the relationship between human and non-human beings. The linguistic impurity of the idiom in Ioannina is approached as an example of expanding the boundaries of the dominant standard modern Greek language.

Through the use of artistic and queer feminist tools, the group writes a new hybrid narrative, in which a non-binary fictional creature named Isnaf is born at the bottom of Lake Pamvotida in Ioannina. This creature speaks a hybrid language, which has absorbed all the watery, eluvial, and solid materialities that coexist in the lake, and, together with them, the memory of stories, narratives, voices, sounds, and smells of its waters (its ‘mnemopond’).

The hybrid voices were created using algorithmic audio processing processes, interweaving field recordings with the voices of the team members. Remnants of processed hides from the ‘tabakika’ stores that operated in the city until 1970 were used as sculptural elements for the installation, bringing together references to violence, care, and poetry.

* The word “isnaf” is common in the idiom of Ioannina and means “guild.”

The work is commissioned by Onassis Stegi for the “Plásmata ΙΙ: Ioannina” exhibition.