Mother Tongue

I visited my sister in London. We went to the Tate Britain and I saw an installation by Zineb Sedira called «Mother Tongue».

The display caption says: «the reflects on storytelling as a way to preserve cultural identity across generations. It underscores the difficulty of maintaining a shared heritage across national and linguistic divides and acknowledges the complexity of identity.»

It’s three TV’s playing simultaneous videos: one of the artist and her mother having a conversation in Arabic, the second of the artist and her daughter conversing in French, and the third of her daughter and mother conversing in English.

The piece made me think of what videos would sound like if I recorded the conversations I have now and in the future, if I had a child. What language would we speak to each other? Where in the world will we be by then? Would we understand each other? Would my mother understand? Will my accent change? Would the child look like me?