Pilar Cruz

VORTO
KLAPO

Intro for Vorto Klapo’s publication by_Pilar Cruz

“I reiterate my opinion (…) that Esperanto is destined to play an important role, that it is useful in itself and that is also protects other languages (…). In my frequent trips to other countries, particularly France and Germany, I hear constant complaints that English has reduced the importance of vehicular language and become an imperialist danger for national languages that are fast losing ground. My opinion is: «The solution is simple: teach Esperanto to children at school and the danger will disappear». But apparently this is not what they want”¹

Although this appears to be the title of a second-rate spy film, Vorto Klapo is the result of translating the expression “key word” into Esperanto using an Internet translator, which gives rise to a very interesting error². It is not a translation done taking into account the rules of the target language, but those of the source language, that literal, awkward version that would include us (with reservations) in the Esperanto community.

Esperanto is an international language created in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof, an ophthalmologist by profession, who was a talented polyglot and obliged by circumstances, by being born a Jew in the Polish city of Bialystok which was then part of the Russian Empire. As a result of communication problems arising from the diverse linguistic communities in the city of his birth, he decided to invent a language that would become the best known of all artificial languages.

This wish for peaceful understanding, this universal spirit, this act of tolerance would be denied during the course of events, by the Holocaust that wiped out practically all the Zamenhof family or the persecutions to which those speaking Esperanto were subject, under the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.

In Catalonia, the Esperanto movement was extremely important until the outbreak of the Civil War and linked to workers’ and anarchistic movements and Catalanist policies, with an important amount of translated Catalan literature.

This language continues to be alive, as shown by the fact that the Vikipedio contains almost 130,000 articles in Esperanto.

A language which all those who speak it consider their own, combating a sensation of inferiority or inclusion with reservations that one has when speaking a foreign language with a native of that language. That desire for inclusion and communication present in the genesis and use of this language is patent in the works of this exhibition, precisely due to the absences. These works place the spectators before an impenetrable fortress if they do not know the key word, the Vorto klapo that allows them to enter a world in which access is granted only by special invitation or with great effort. Only those who know the password can enter that cave.

The access codes, key or door are passwords that unveil some of the lines of the works presented by Andrés Bartos, Abel del Castillo, Jaume Ferrete or Vanesa Varela.

The work by Jaume Ferrete uses the elemental particles of communication, the spoken word, language, what is said. It uses the human voice as an instrument that utters a language, and devices that amplify, distort or transform. In this way, the notion of saying is problematised by what these imply: the diversity of voices and the act, which can be extended to the political sphere, of censuring, transforming or amplifying them, the possibilities of speaking or raising one’s voice.

In the exhibition, Jaume gives a literal account of a series of models for forming an idea of the exhibition space, the spectator, the artist and the work; in other words, the channel, receiver, emitter and message to be communicated. The exhibition is yet another device for amplifying, distorting or transforming the voice of the artist. As Jaume says, exhibiting is an artist’s way of saying something, so speaking about exhibiting is speaking about expression.

What Abel del Castillo expresses is that a community needs exclusive symbols to be formed and to be able to understand itself, especially if one is aged fifteen. Abel works on that idea of a community through his own biography, on a nostalgic journey to Consticon, his own lost Arcadia, a country he invented during his adolescence. A gang culture that invents a language used by the members of the gang to communicate with each other, and take pleasure in its cryptic nature, like the Nasdat invented by Anthony Burgess in A clockwork orange. Because to counteract that anxiety that attacks one on the way to the adult world, the child within the adolescent needs to feel unique, gregariously unique. Abel returns to Consticon to take pleasure in that paradise lost, in a rural world that is fast dying, in that symbolic territory that belongs to his own life and by extension also to ours.

Vanesa Varela opens the door between public and private space, in the spectrum of greys that lie between both. Vanesa sends warnings, draws attention to those cracks in the territory. The idea of public space that closes for the good of the majority, due to reasons of security, that refutes its condition of res publica and excludes the population that uses and enjoys it. For that reason the reference to opening doors, locks or unlocking doors is used as a metaphor of taking action on the cracks in the public sphere. However small, her actions are hard to control, easily dispersed, captured and close. She intervenes in the space in a non-spectacular manner, with ephemeral guerrilla-like actions. Vanesa tells us the specific location of some of these actions, by giving us a tutorial about how to open a lock. In the same way as in an instructions booklet, her translation sounds artificial and unnatural. This is access to a language that is as artificial as opening a door without a key.

Finally, in Ubennkante Frau (Unknown Woman) by Andrés Bartos, consciousness and unconsciousness (two realities that connect with each other) are superimposed on each other. The star is between wakefulness and sleep, between a state of memory and amnesia. But it is in the dream that Eva becomes fully aware and remembers, recognising her true nature and that of those accompanying her. Dreams are often more real, clarifying, illuminating and ominous. Eva wants to communicate with those beings that she sees when she is sleeping and when she finally meets them, they are not what she expected. The main character suffers from amnesia and is searching for her forgotten identity. Amnesia is not being able to remember how you got to a certain place or why your head is injured. Amnesia is a mode of excluding yourself from those memories without which your personality would disappear. Ubennkante Frau tries to cross through those doors between the two realities, at a slow and reflexive pace, poetic like some dreams, strange like a déjà vu experience.

1Umberto Eco. Interview published in the Newsletter of the Spanish Esperanto Federation, Saragossa, nº 309, 1993, p. 8-11).

2The correct translation would be Enigma vorto, or Sekreta vorto. Vorto means “word” and klapo is “musical key” but also has the meaning “valve”, “opening leaf” or “piston”