Video intervention. Abandoned shop with Russian delicacies next to the Refugee Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic. Prague, 2016.

The piece was composed of the statements written by my students, asylum seekers in the Czech Republic, during their lessons of the Czech language. From the texts of 12 respondents of different nationalities, I selected sentences that briefly capture situations from their lives before and after emigration. The resulting metatext of 77 sentences constitutes their collective voice. 

I used their writing in an authentic form, without correcting mistakes. Mostly, a native speaker understands the meaning without any difficulties, sometimes he has to put an effort into grasping it and sometimes the content of the message is barely recognazible because of the grammatical and lexical mistakes, which have shifted the meaning in an unpredictable direction. This fact, which might be a source of a poetic and fresh view of a language from the perspective of a native speaker, turns communication into a source of frustration for the foreigners looking for asylum, since for them the command of language plays a crucial role in adjusting to a new home. 

As we proceed throughout the text, individual sentences appear and dissapear in a calleidoscop without a fixed narrative.

The isolated expressions on the right side of the screen represent an outcom of the comparison of the frequency vocabulary of the native speakers of the Czech language with the frequency vocabulary of asylum seekers. The expressions which have been crossed out, are not significant for asylum seekers. The words which have not been crossed out, occur more frequently in a vocabulary of asylum seekers.