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Biba Cole (1997) is an artist and musician. She is interested in language, especially in slippages: the small lingual errors and byproducts of human communication. These may include side tracks in stories, or casual acts and sounds like yawning, stuttering, spitting, or stumbling over one’s tongue. In daily interactions we often ignore such utterings as they have no clear function. To Cole, however, they form the point of departure for associations, playing, and artistic research.
In Reading Slippages (2023-2024) Coles explores the idea of side-tracking. The installation consists of a sound artwork, three gouache paintings, and moving images. These three layers are constantly overlapping in different ways and together make up a total experience. The sound artwork expresses thoughts about tide pools, mouths, thresholds, and musical notation, while it gradually loses track and starts again. Cole invites the viewer to reflect on what will happen if you take a side track and find your way while wandering and occasionally tripping.
Reading Slippages evolved out of research into the practice of putting text between brackets. According to Cole we often see words between brackets as less important. But at the same time these brackets focus our attention on them. Placing something between brackets is similar to taking a side track, like straying from the main text. To Cole side-tracking has an important function: you step aside in order to make clear why you were standing where you were standing in the first place.
Text: Sarah van Binsbergen
Translated from Dutch by Marie Louise Schoondergang (The Art of Translation)