Havîn Al-Sîndy, Céline Semaan, and Payam Sharifi in conversation with Hanno Hauenstein on translation, embodied memory, and the power to name experience

Nearly every alphabet in use today got where it is by conquest, or by a state deciding that a population would now read differently, as Turkey did in 1928 when Atatürk replaced Arabic script with Latin letters over a matter of months. Border officers police accents on a smaller scale, as do dinner guests, who ask where someone is really from and then listen to the answer for clues. Memory, however, is harder to police. People revise a story slightly with every retelling, while some people remember things physically, with no sentence attached to the memory at all.

At the Soft Power Festival, Hanno Hauenstein moderated a conversation with Payam Sharifi of the art collective Slavs & Tatars, Céline Semaan, and Havîn Al-Sîndy about language as one of the more polite places where powerful people sort insiders from outsiders. Over the hour, the panelists get into the politics of scripts, along with the peculiar, exhausting expectation that an artist who works between languages should also serve as her own translator and tour guide. The speakers also take up a question that sounds academic: who gets to say that someone has understood? Anyone who has stood at a border knows the answer is often a visa officer.

The three panelists, refreshingly, do not agree with one another in a dynamic and productive exchange. Sharifi describes a script as an act of hospitality toward a reader, and he is suspicious of the barely noticed assumption that anything worth reading should eventually exist in English. Semaan works from her own displacement and from her family’s archives, asking how much of a document or a phrase anyone can actually move from one language into another. Al-Sîndy’s starting point comes earlier, with a language whose speakers have had to reshape it twice, first to survive violence, then to make sense to outsiders whose sympathy depended on understanding. She locates the cost of that reshaping in the body: in sounds a speaker learns to suppress, and in knowledge people hand to one another by talking or by doing instead of by writing anything down.

Eventually, the panel turns its skepticism on the festival itself, and there is something pleasingly awkward about a panel at a festival named for soft power asking whether soft power is any good. The political scientist Joseph Nye coined the phrase in 1990 to describe a country’s ability to get what it wants through attraction, through its culture, values, and reputation, without coercion or payment. Governments have mostly used soft power as public relations. The three panelists ask whether artists or activists can use soft power for liberation without adopting the methods of states. A second question follows: can artists describe experiences that people cannot yet put into political terms, given that most of the available terms, like refugee, migrant, or asylum seeker, come from offices whose job is to sort people? By the end, the three speakers arrive near a position: a politics of liberation has to include the right to remain partly unreadable, to keep a script, an accent, or a memory that no border agent, curator, or ministry can fully decode.

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Hanno Hauenstein: We’re speaking against a backdrop in which people are trying to define what culture is, what counts as legitimate culture, and what doesn’t. It’s wonderful that Anahita and everyone involved in this festival have given us space to discuss these questions openly; which is something that isn’t necessarily taken for granted, especially in a time when words such as genocide to describe the situation in Gaza continue to be be delegitimized and policed in Germany

At the same time, language also just seems increasingly reduced these days. I see AI slop everywhere; it is something very vulgar and becoming ubiquitous. That is part of the context of this conversation, as well.

Let me introduce our speakers. Payam Sharifi is a co-founder of Slavs and Tatars, the artist collective whose work addresses the vast region between the former Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China. Languages, alphabets, and ways of deciphering cultural expression are central to its practice.

Céline Semaan is an artist, writer, and founder of the independent media platform Everything Is Political. Her memoir, A Woman Is a School, explores questions of war, displacement, and memory. Language is also central to her work in this exhibition.

Havîn Al-Sîndy works at the intersection of the body, memory, war, and displacement. Her work here addresses organ theft in the context of Kurdistan, and language is at its core as well.

Let’s begin with you, Payam: why, actually, are Slavs and Tatars so obsessed with alphabets?

Slavs and Tatars: We tend to think of alphabets as innocent: an aleph looks like an aleph, an A like an A, and a B like a B. But if you look at their histories, alphabets accompany empires.

The Latin alphabet travelled with Christianity, the Arabic alphabet with Islam. In the region we work with, Cyrillic was associated first with Orthodox Christianity and later with Soviet colonisation in Central Asia and the Caucasus.

When the Soviets changed the writing systems of Muslim populations, part of the intention was to separate people from their attachment to Islam. These communities weren’t necessarily speaking Arabic; many spoke Turkic languages but used Arabic script.

There was even a movement to Romanise Russian, because Cyrillic itself was considered marked by Christianity, and this was an atheist revolution. Over the past century or two, the Latin alphabet has also become a vehicle for secularisation. Turkey’s alphabet reform under Atatürk is another example.

Hanno: How does that history resonate today? Why bring it into the present through works such as the carpet which you can see over there?

Slavs and Tatars: One principle of Slavs and Tatars has always been to do what other people aren’t doing. In more than twenty years, I don’t think we’ve used the term “decolonisation” in our work. Not because it isn’t important, but because I would rather do it than keep talking about it.

We have focused on the margins of the Muslim, Russian-speaking, and Turkic-speaking worlds, giving those places a platform rather than producing discourse about the act of doing so.

People who use non-Latin scripts are constantly transcribing and transliterating. Yet everyone talks about translation, and almost nobody thinks about transliteration.

Hanno: Could you explain what you mean by that?

Slavs and Tatars: Transliteration changes the script without changing the language. When I send a message in Russian, for example, I sometimes write it in Latin letters rather than switching my phone’s keyboard to Cyrillic. I can write Cyrillic; I just don’t always do it.

There is a disputed linguistic theory that we inhabit “script worlds.” We tend to think about linguistic worlds, but less about the ways communication is shaped by living within a Latin, Cyrillic, or Arabic-script world.

Céline Semaan: That resonates with me. I speak Arabic fluently, but I don’t read or write it. I was displaced at a young age, and when I returned to Beirut as a teenager, I didn’t feel able to learn its written form.

I describe myself as an illiterate Arabic-speaking woman, which is painful. I use Arabish all the time: Arabic written in Latin letters. I take the letters I know from English or French and use them to write Arabic.

Hanno: The language of decolonisation has become somewhat all-encompassing in the art world. However, this often comes without institutions giving up power – or allowing the very people who have been and continue to be affected by colonialism to define their own narratives. Does that resonate with your work in relation to Kurdistan, Lebanon, or Palestine?

Havîn Al-Sîndy: With Kurdish, I think we have to begin earlier. Arabic literature and calligraphy have a recognised place in Western culture. With Kurdish, we have to begin with the experience of a forbidden language: one you are prevented from speaking or hearing.

How do you talk about a language when its presence has been denied, when it survives in the body, in singing, and in forms that may not be recorded?

What interests me now is how Kurdish itself is changing. We search for Western theories through which to understand it and make it visible. In that process, letters, dialects, and accents are altered or overlooked. Visibility can reproduce the very patterns of colonisation we claim to oppose.

The debate is not only about which form of Kurdish should be dominant—Kurmanji, Sorani, Bahdini, Zaza, and others—but which will make us most legible to Western theorists.

Hanno: Are you saying that something gets lost in the effort to fit into a Western framework?

Havîn: It is about internalising the demand for visibility. People turn to Hannah Arendt or Foucault while neglecting their own philosophical traditions and Sufism.

Dengbêj singing, for example, carries an archive of Kurdish language. Yet poems, rhymes, and verses are being changed to make them more understandable to a Western audience.

This also changes the body. The tongue changes. People lose ways of rolling an R, making a sound, carrying a tone or a trill. Art should address not only the fact that a language has been violated, but how the body changes through the sounds of another language.

Hanno: Céline, can you relate to that, given your own work?

Céline: For me, decolonisation is not a metaphor. I’m thinking of the essay of that title, by Eve Tuck [and K. Wayne Yang]. [1] It insists on decolonisation’s relationship to Indigenous land and sovereignty.

In the contexts of Palestine and Lebanon, I also think about return: the land’s relationship with its Indigenous people. That doesn’t mean there is no room for people who arrive through migration or other histories, but sovereignty cannot simply disappear from the discussion.

When we say “decolonise your hair” or “decolonise design,” what do we mean? Is it enough to use Arabic letters or write from right to left? I want to return to the political proposition at the root of the word.

Havîn: I want to ask about “land back,” because the phrase shows how language can shape our thinking about colonisation.

There are cultures, including nomadic cultures, whose relationship to land does not begin with possessing it. When we use that phrase, do we risk returning to geography and borders?

In the Kurdish archives I work with, I encounter the return of people, culture, language, bodies, and food. I don’t necessarily encounter the same terminology. We need to recognise when we are describing experience through words inherited from an existing theory.

Take Rojava. I hear it described everywhere as a “model.” But it is not a model.

Hanno: Where do you hear that language? In mainstream media?

Havîn: In the media, on panels, in theoretical writing. Calling it a model turns it into a standard for describing democracy or resistance.

What happens if we admit that we don’t yet have the language to describe it? Recognising that we are trapped within a language can be productive. It means there is work to do.

Hanno: Do I understand correctly that this kind of discourse can impose a vocabulary on colonised people that they may not want or affirm?

Céline: I understand the point slightly differently, if I may. “Land back,” spoken in English, can sound as though land is a commodity. That is precisely the understanding the movement challenges.

Thank you for raising it, because otherwise someone could ask: what distinguishes Indigenous relations to land from colonial ownership if we use the same terms for both?

English is my third language. It can be very limiting when I try to express these cultural relationships. We search for words and cannot find exactly what we need.

As an immigrant and someone who has been displaced, I have spent my life translating culture. A friend once said to me that design is translation too: an arrow tells you where to go, a warning symbol communicates a situation visually.

I chose to write A Woman Is a School in English because I wanted to reach a particular audience and communicate cultural subtleties from my region. But the book also confronts the stubbornness of English and the ways it limits what I can say.

Havîn: My point isn’t only about English. I encounter the difficulty within Kurdish theory too. We are trying to describe experiences for which the available language is insufficient.

I’m tired of every new form of fascism being described as the same as something that came before. I’m not saying earlier theories are wrong or should be discarded. But we also need new language, texts, and theory.

That is why the term “soft power” interests and unsettles me. What are we doing with it here? What does its softness conceal about the processes that precede war?

I speak seven languages, but I still struggle to describe certain experiences in Kurdish, German, or English. I learned English from SpongeBob, so you can imagine the difficulty. We need the humility to say: we do not yet have the language to describe this.

A curator once told me that I would have a difficult time in the art world because she couldn’t identify what I was doing. She said the work seemed to happen before the art object. I said, “Yes—then you have the language.” She replied, “No, I still can’t write about it.” We laughed, and I found that exchange beautiful.

For me, it is no longer only about producing an artwork. The work needs a language too, or in ten years we may realise we have repeated the language of the colonisers.

Hanno: Let me jump on this point regarding your discomfort with the term “soft power”. What is this about? The association with cultural diplomacy as a state practice, allegedly opposed to war?

Havîn: How do you say Verschleierung?

Hanno: Concealment.

Havîn: Yes. That is the question: what the language conceals, including in Germany’s own ways of speaking.

Hanno: We’re having this discussion in English because this is the language we share, the smallest common denominator if you will. But that choice, of course, brings hierarchies of its own. Perhaps this panel should have been multilingual.

Slavs and Tatars: Honestly, yes. You could have spoken French, you could have spoken Kurdish.

Céline: I could also speak Arabic.

Hanno: The problem is that I couldn’t translate everything.

Slavs and Tatars: You don’t necessarily have to. English flattens things.

We recognise that Kurdish and many other languages are under threat. But we underestimate the pressure on major languages too. German and Persian each have roughly 140 million speakers—or perhaps 100 to 120 million for German, and a similar number for Persian. Those are rough estimates. [2] Yet in Germany and Austria, humanities researchers increasingly write in English. What happens to German as a language of thought over time?

I call English a plague of a language. We should stop speaking it whenever we can.

Germans often switch to English because they