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Giulia Bruno

Sometimes it’s not about a person or a career; it’s simply about a single narrative built up around a dizzying network of connections that
work that provides you with an experience so rich that you can spend implicates everything from morphology and linguistics to twen-
months or even years digesting it. And sometimes you encounter it tieth-century utopianism and postcolonial theory. Visually that
in a Budapest basement during last year’s Off-Biennale. That’s where means that we encounter professors of English from universities
I stumbled into Artificial Act. Research for a Film (2017–), an ongoing in Jamaica and Connecticut, a museum devoted to the 1955 Afro-
videowork by Berlin-based Italian Giulia Bruno. I knew nothing Asian Bandung Conference in Indonesia, a series of Fiat technical
about her. Later, when I looked her up, I found out that she had manuals in Esperanto (which the company published in some of
a degree in biology, and then studied photography and video in its markets until the late 1970s to save itself the hassle…), the 2017
Milan. More recently she’s been a part of the Anthropocene Project World Esperanto Congress in Seoul (which staged a side meeting
at the HKW in Berlin and has collaborated with artist Armin Linke. in parliament about Esperanto and Korean unification) and a small
Before I looked her up I sat on a rug in the basement and spent a little martial-arts demonstration by children. Watching all this was like
over 40 minutes watching this latest version of Artificial Act, and then witnessing the mapping out of some sort of backdoor globalisation,
another 20 minutes watching bits of it again. And not just because my or, more simply, to be like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole. And
legs had fallen asleep either. if your initial thought was that the subject of the video might be a
Artificial Act is a video about Esperanto, the language developed little obscure and whimsical, 40 minutes later it seemed to be
in the late nineteenth century by L.L. Zamenhof, a Polish ophthal- connected to every key issue of the age of globalisation: internation-
mologist from Białystok; it’s spoken by around two million people alism, nationalism, colonialism, marketing, cost-saving, power rela-
today. Zamenhof (who wrote about his invention under the pseu- tions, cross-border economics and identity formation in its neces-
donym Doktoro Esperanto – hence the name) wanted it be an interna- sary and contingent states. The ability to do that is a rare art.
tional language that would remove the hassle of learning multiple Bruno’s previous video is titled Capital (2014); it’s about the poli-
foreign tongues, overcome the cultural and social divisions caused by tics of drinking-water. And I’m looking forward to spinning down
those tongues and promote some version of international harmony. that plughole next. Presumably I’ll emerge in time to witness the
More generally, Artificial Act is a film about language and power, its final version of Artificial Act.

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