Your Words in My Mouth | My Voice on Your Tongue by Ghislaine Leung is a co-created project with Zubayr Abdullah, Moriom Begum, Sumaiya Choudhury, Jenna Islam, Khadra Jama, Kaazim Pasha, Sadiyah Rahman and Sumaiyyah Tasneem from St. Paul’s Way Trust School.
From October – April 2018, a group of students from St. Paul’s Way Trust School in Tower Hamlets, worked with Ghislaine Leung's long term workshop series Your Words in My Mouth | My Voice on Your Tongue to explore collaborative modes of production that bring voice, verbatim speech, listening and gesture back into processes of writing. Through a series of transcription exercises the group explored different methods of generating material from their own contexts and resources and collectively developed processes of editing and distributing the works they produced. During the project the group visited the Southbank Acoustic Research Centre, where these transcription exercises in deep internal listening were repeated in zero and maximal sound conditions.
The project culminated in the group designing a collection of merchandise, including phone cases, socks, hijabs and hoodies. The items included quotes and references from the material they had generated over the course of the project. The collection was documented at Crossrail Place, with the group directing and modelling the different items, shot by Wendy Huynh.
As a result, UP Projects and Leung have published ME, which documents the conversations that took place during Your Words in My Mouth, My Voice On Your Tongue. The words exchanged have been left un-edited to preserve the language that the students use with one another, and distilled into a collective poem also contained in the publication. These texts are printed alongside a ‘look book’ of the images taken at Crossrail Place.
Commissioned by UP Projects in partnership with A New Direction and part of Creative Digital Careers.
