Nicoline van Harskamp

Names can cross cultural boundaries in ways that most other words cannot, but they can also suffer lots of damage along the way. Mispronounced, garbled, even replaced completely with something more acceptable to the dominant culture, they can start to lead a life of their own. This is the story behind a new performative work by artist Nicoline van Harskamp, who is well-known for her artistic research into the role and transformation of English as the lingua franca of globalization. In a bureaucratic setting suggesting a place where names are collected, filed, inflicted, withdrawn, and adapted, van Harskamp stages a storytelling session of different anecdotes about naming. These anecdotes are an agglomeration of real and fictional narratives gathered through extended research and conversation with migrants about the fate of their names, in Graz and elsewhere. Put back together and fictionalized in an evocative literary text, they provide the basis for an immersive performance, in the course of which it becomes clear that proper names are not always bound to their owners. Rather, they live on independently as pieces of data to be stored, markers of identity, brands, and tools of surveillance whose location is all important. In van Harskamp’s performance, names appear as theatrical personas and marketing avatars, always under observation, becoming a language of their own.