An altar for the fleshy tongue

An altar for the fleshy tongue was shown as a solo show at the RMIT Gallery, Swanston St. Melbourne VIC (2023) and at the KUVA/ Tila Gallery in Helsinki (2024), in the group show Palaamisia.

“Stephanie Misa presents us with a proposition: can languages be held within the body across generations, and if so, what tools do we need to reawaken this dormant knowledge?

The persistence of spoken languages - their extinctions, resurrections, and resilience around the globe – forms a focal point for Misa that allows her to examine her own linguistic inheritance as it relates to other people. Misa’s first language, Bisaya, is the language that is spoken in the two-channel video where she talks to her son, who does not understand her mother tongue. She does this not as a means to teach her language, but rather as a way to gauge how much of her language lives, unconsciously, within her child. The tongue, as the site where language leaves the body and enters the world, becomes a focus for Misa, as she seeks to understand what secrets potentially lay embedded in that fleshy transmitter.

The installation is punctuated with sites of gratitude: a contemporary wax cylinder recording of Misa singing points to her interest in some of the most globally significant language recordings in existence. The 19th Century invention of the phonograph made it possible for sound to be captured by a needle onto a wax cylinder (known as a record) and played back. Misa creates an altar of chicken’s feet cast as wax candles along the rear, smoke-stained wall; a spectral residue evoking the summoning of powerful immaterial forces and a bridging of the past and the present. The main altar, a tree branch, affixed to the floor by delicate pillars of wax, is at the heart of Misa’s installation – it hovers in the room, as tenuous and fragile as the mother tongue of a colonised people.”

Julia Powles, Curator RMIT Gallery

KUVA/Tila Photos by Vincent Roumagnac & Sakari Viika
RMIT Gallery Photos by Sebastian Kainey