Symposium on Diverse Epistemologies: Between Languages: The Modular Typography of Dardja on Social Media

"In 2020 French president Emmanuel Macron eased access to national archives relating to colonial Algeria. A review of these new public domain records reveal insights into colonial pedagogical practices which directed the print production of graphology chapbooks and broadsides, designed to shape indigenous women’s education through language, in order to homogenize ethnic and cultural diversity in the milieu.

This presentation will focus on an ongoing research-based art project that draws from these national archives to highlight the colonial impact and contemporary development of the Dardja dialect in post-colonial Algeria and throughout the Algerian diaspora in France and North America. More specifically, there will be a focus on how women shape Dardja to artistically facilitate and preserve the creolization of language as a form of anti colonial resistance, in tradition with indigenous text and textile design-based art practices, and how this can provide a non-Western perspective into the French feminist notion of écriture féminine, or "women's writing".

This presentation is also concerned with how the typography of Dardja manifests on social media using letters, glyphs, numbers, and emojis to visually and phonetically reflect the diverse grammatical systems that frame languages like Tamazight, Semitic and Andalusian Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Spanish, French, and English.

Using similar technical modes of print production like serigraphy, woodblock, and calligraphy found in the 2020 released colonial documents at the French National Archives in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, I will discuss how my artwork uses analog and digital mark making tools to transcribe, translate, and replicate large compositions of text, image, and color, on paper and digital projection inorder to exhibit poetic re-interpretations of these historical precedents for contemporary considerations." -Dr. Iman Djouini

Join us as we welcome Dr. Iman Djouini, Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. Often employing print media, placemaking, and typography, Dr. Djouini’s art practice explores themes of gender and postcolonial spatial relations. Her teaching and research interests include decolonial pedagogies through design-based learning, theory, and studio-based research.

Please register in the flyer below. 

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS).