How Islands Shape Lines, Signs and Scripts
Islands are not just places where human beings have hidden, evaded, or distracted themselves. Islands can be experiments, where identities are played with to create cultural phenomena that are weird, unique, or idiosyncratic. This project analyses several islands (Crete, Cyprus, Sulawesi, Rapa Nui, Caroline islands) as sui generi cultural hubs, where representations mirrored the lines of the horizon, the confines, and the boundaries to gaze inwards. These lines and demarcations, create an island gaze, that transfers into symbols, signs, and exercises in code-making, used to distinguish, not just linguistically but also through the manipulation of shapes. Several islands in the world invent writing as an experiment with difference and belonging, in ways that set them apart from other, non-island contexts. And in this trajectory of invention resides the most salient expression of human creativity, that which harnesses icons and geometries, and translates them into shapes with meaning.
Specializing in ancient writing systems, Silvia Ferrara has developed multi-stranded techniques for the decoding of the Aegean Bronze Age scripts, the earliest in Europe, and published the results in international peer-reviewed journals. She is also an expert on the invention of writing in the world, Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica and Egypt. She has published two monographs with Oxford University Press, and a wide array of articles in top-tier journals in the field. Her latest monograph, Writing and Cognition, Harnessing Shapes into Signs is in the works with Cambridge University Press. The book with Feltrinelli, La Grande Invenzione was published in 2019 and translated into several languages, in the USA as The Greatest Invention (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), UK (Picador), Germany (C. H. Beck), France (La fabuleuse histoire de l’invention de l'écriture, Seuil), Spain (Anagrama), Greece (Patakis), China (Chonquing) and Saudi Arabia. A second book with Feltrinelli, Il Salto. Figure, segni, parole: Viaggio all’origine dell’immaginazione (2021, translated into French as Avant l’écriture. Signes, figures, paroles, published by Seuil and into German as Der Sprung. Eine Reise zu den Anfängen des Denkens in der Steinzeit, by C. H. Beck). The French edition won the 2023 literary prize of the Fondation Martine Aublet, hosted at the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris.
This lecture will showcase specific cases of ›island gaze‹, in which code-making, symbols, icons and geometric configurations were deployed into signs and scripts.