The collaborative practice of Joana Atemengue Owona and Dejvi Haxhi is an inquiry into the unstable relationship between the self, language, and the structures through which meaning is produced. Drawing, among other things, on the psychoanalytic distinction between the lived “je” and the socially constituted “moi”, their practice works through appropriated images, language, voice, and associative material. An experimental arrangement emerges which repeatedly fails to coincide, while moving through absurdity, interruption, repetition, and semantic dislocation. At the centre of their practice is a question they repeatedly return to: how can we speak about something that resists language?
Failure is not treated as a limitation, but as a method. Their approach is characterised by the assuredness that whatever this project entails, it is doomed to fail. When speaking about the inexpressible, language always fails. The artists perspective on the media they use, seek to find the closest point of proximity without merging completely. Through this careful and sometimes even absurd, almost nonsensical set of rules they attempt to approach that which evades language – through which, maybe, just maybe, some meaning is to be found.
The reading will take place as part of our exhibition if words are to be sounded.
You are warmly invited to also attend the performance by Sophie Seita on November 12, 2026, and the workshop by Noelle BuAbbud on November 14, 2026, both of which touch upon the topics of the reading with their own perspectives.