As classes, events and flights get cancelled, people work from home, border walls get built and travel bans are enforced, the need for spaces where we can connect, listen and learn from each other is greater than ever.
TONGUES intends to offer such a space. A space to be inspired. A space to be reminded that beyond the breathless urgency of the 24-hour news cycle and the overwhelming, incessant, infinite scrolling of social media, there are remarkable people doing remarkable things.
While TONGUES will evolve and expand over time, our premise is likely to remain the same: we’re a home for conversations with questioners, mavericks and mavens — people who go against the grain and refuse to follow the herd (to mix metaphors!). The questions we ask recognise the tension between someone’s work and life, and how the latter can bleed into or inspire the former. In other words, we don’t just ask what and how but also why.
TONGUES offers an unabashed riposte to nationalism and populist prejudice: instead of feeling threatened by diversity, we’re grateful for its manifold virtues, recognising that our differences in culture, beliefs, language, geography and disciplines can catalyse new and exciting ways of thinking, dreaming, doing and making.
The first interviewees we’re featuring on TONGUES encompass a wide spectrum of thinkers and creators. From South Africa and the American South to the UK, Germany and Portugal, each are bravely doing something different.
We’d like you to meet:
- Anna Dumitriu, the maker of a Plague Dress (and other deadly designs!), and Hermione Flynn, a fashion designer with a 3D avatar
- After Architecture, the young architect duo playfully transforming public spaces
- Crosslucid, the creative directors who draw on various mediums to create “visual elixirs”
- Zander Blom, the South African artist experimenting with paint, and Brett Murray, the sculptor from the same country whose pop pieces speak truth to power
- Jennifer Bonner, the architecture professor drawing on iconographic imagery to create a new Southern style
- Maria Vlachou, the activist making Portuguese cultural spaces accessible
More than mere playful nostalgia, the TONGUES aesthetic pays homage to the scrappy, egalitarian optimism of the early internet — when blogs, chat rooms, listservs and message boards facilitated raw, unfiltered and honest dialogue and connection, offering a bracing alternative to the communication monopoly imposed by the snooty establishment and guarded by blinkered gatekeepers. It is this exuberantly rebellious and expressive spirit that TONGUES hopes to both honour and to keep alive.
Even in the age of surveillance capitalism and the bot-fuelled disconnection, alienation and misinformed outrage so synonymous with Big Tech, we remain convinced that the web can still offer a refuge for the curious, the unorthodox, the non-conforming — and that it can facilitate meaningful, respectful and nuanced engagement.
And so, wash your hands, make a cup of tea (or a martini) and sit down to enjoy the conversations with these excellent, weird, and very wonderful people.
Who should we interview next? If you have ideas, email us!
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Thanks for joining us!
Catarina and Alex
