perhaps this can
esperanto
My interest in Esperanto stems from a broader exploration into systems of classification, typographic infrastructures, and the material remains of utopian imagination. Esperanto, as an auxiliary language designed for mutual understanding beyond national or cultural boundaries, offers a unique case study in how language might be deliberately constructed as a hopeful social technology.
Central to this inquiry is the Keighley Esperanto Society (1902–c.1990s), founded by Joseph Rhodes in a small West Yorkshire town. The Society’s legacy - preserved in a box of ephemera in Keighley Reference Library - includes postcards, dictionaries, newspaper cuttings, and other quietly radical artefacts. These objects form the basis for a series of essays and typographic experiments that trace the formation of a ‘textual community’: one sustained not by territory or state, but by shared values, visual forms, and the everyday labour of communication.
Perhaps it can not be anything:
the persistent fragility of utopian language projects, and the question of what endures when their wider systems fall away. In exploring Esperanto’s local and material articulations - especially through the Keighley archive - I’m less concerned with measuring its success or failure than with attending to what remains, and how those things continue to speak (however faintly) of the desire to build a more mutual world through words.
I’ve written about Keighley’s Esperanto archives here, here, here and here.
I’ve exhibited work inspired by, and in response to, the archive here, here and here.
I’m currently developing new work which will hopefully draw new connections between the archive and the town - and with its communities - through emerging ideas of typographic cultural citizenship.