KAKSIKIELINEN

Rogério Nuno Costa     *    Recover Laboratory

2025

“This is the voice of my thoughts, a magic trick to test my existence. I'm going to introduce myself to the world. I’m going to identify myself. These are my thoughts speaking out loud. For someone to be able to hear me thinking, I have to say it. For someone to be able to read it, I have to write it. I am two languages: the one that I speak and the one that is being heard. I am two languages, I am bilingual, but I do not command either language, although I command them. I know the words, but my story escapes me every day, just like everything else. If I say "This is me", how many meanings does it have, this thing that I say? Infinite ones! It's an endless task. And yet, there is a meaning that overlaps again and again: "He and I", that’s what the others hear. Because my story must be the same as yours, which is the same as yours, which is the same as yours, and because all stories can always be summed up in one word: "story". Equality says that we are all a skeleton, that we are all an “I”. Equality is the great meaning, the vortex that attracts; equality is the great misunderstanding, so enormous it can even swallow the difference. And so I dedicate myself to this infinite task: to make meanings disappear! The reason I make them disappear, though, is not to reduce them more and more until I reach the true meaning, until I reach the truth of what I’m saying. It is not for making the two languages coincide or for determining the supposed "original language" that I erase meanings, no. I make meanings disappear so that I can find MORE meanings. Infinite ones. I erase meanings like I erase misunderstandings. And then I can look for the infinite difference. My language is not yours.”



José Maria Vieira Mendes

"Bilingue" (2015)