AA students Renate Lurdesa Baumane and Nelli Shkarupina are participating in the conference, Languages of the Future at the Institute of Advanced Studies at UCL on Thursday 5 June. The conference, which will run over 5 June (in person) and 6 June (online), invites interdisciplinary discussion examining the complex relationships between language(s) and future(s), to consider what a language of the future might look like.

Specifically, through the archaeological site of Tauric Chersonesus in Crimea, Ukraine, Baumane and Shkarupina examine the necessity for alternative archival frameworks. The Russian revisionist project titled New Chersonese acts as a precedent in their study, of how the different interpretations of symbolic meaning have provoked, or will provoke, the past and future physical and linguistic reconstructions of a place.In understanding the narrative transmission process, Baumane and Shkarupina seek to bring attention not only to the particularities of narrating (hi-)/stories in archival practice, but also to the agency of the listener/receiver of information. In the work, Baumane and Shkarupina emphasise that language is inherently relational, and while listening has historically been framed as the receptive counterpart to speech, it has the potential to assume a significantly more active role within archival practice if the ways in which we approach it are reworked.

Click here to find out more about the conference, Languages of the Future.

Image: Film still of New Chersonese by Anna Afanasyeva, published on YouTube, 28 July 2024.