Lursivequème, is a poetic and subjective observation of phonems in french language.
I took photos from the mouth when the sounds were pronounced. By transliterating them in pictograms I started to play with them and I tried to make it as if it was a writing. To be able to write them was part of my process, I wanted to create a writing. So I created a ductus, (the the (The number of strokes that make up a written letter, and the direction, sequence and speed in which they are written, according to wiktionary). By that process I wanted to be as close as posible to the history of writing. And perhaps have my own there.
In my work I question the Image of the letter. After studying 6 months at PaTi in South Korea, Ahn Sang SOO’s school, I discovered how the korean language worked. It is essentially based on phonetics.
So basically, korean letters are phonems so what we read is what we pronounce.
That is not the case in french. As I described it earlier in this book, a sound can be written in various ways. Such as the [o] sound in “cardio” can be written in 3 ways :
- o
- au
- eau
So I thought of a french alphabet entirely phonetic.
And I imagine to what it could look like. I started this project with a friend, Anaïs Gueffier, who was searching a way to write a slang : the louchébem. In english it coul be transalted as lutcherbem. It as the particularity to be created by butchers who wanted to be able to speak but so that the client could not understand. In this slang, we have to replace the first letter of a word by an L, then put the first letter to at the end.
After this we have to add a suffix, by -ème, -èque, -uche, -oque... For example, butcher becomes “lutcherbem”.
Following this logic, “lursivequème” means “Cursive” in louchébem
Silk-screen printing on butcher's apron
