Andara Shastika

Andara Shastika, NGAJI – /ŋa’dʒiʔ/, participatory circle, 2016

NGAJI – /ŋa’dʒiʔ/ introduces German and English loanwords in their sounds of origin. The term ngaji means reading the Qur’an in Arabic, a religious ritual in Indonesia that incorporates oral and aural methods to learn a language while leaving out the semantic concern. This form of speed language acquisition has enabled most Indonesians to embody an unknown alphabet – a capability to spell and pronounce but scarcely to speak. In the learning circle NGAJI – /ŋa’dʒiʔ/, a collection of words will be demonstrated by the voices of their native speakers and presented in the corresponding IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) system. It’s initiated as a performative way to share the discoveries in the project Restoring the Broken Parts, titled after the Arabic meaning of ‘algebra’, viz. the ‘restoration of dislocated bones’. Restoring the Broken Parts revisits the sounds, meanings and emotions of these words in their languages of origin through dialogues and phonetic archivization and explores the relationship of ‘dis-possession’ between a subject and a language.