Barrabackslarrabang (2009-2010) (2009-2010)
By Imogen Stidworthy
HD video 9”15, colour, stereo, English and backslang spoken In Barrabackslarrabang Stidworthy interweaves tropes of class, race, trade and desire in hidden backwaters and idealized forms of the voice – Standard Pronounciation and backslang. Standard Pronunciation emerged with the birth of the railway, to help the flow of trade, as millions of businesspeople travelling around Britain were confronted for the first time by accents they could not understand, while backslang is a subverted form of English associated primarily with illegal trade, and was designed to protect against being overheard, particularly by the ears of a law that didn’t square with economic conditions on the ground. Speech is sewn with rogue sounds to confuse the ear, and slips easily in everyday banter into a linguistic game of skill and excess. Liverpool backslang involves replacing the first or all vowels in key words of a phrase with ‘ab’, ‘ag’ or ‘arrab’, while the Birmingham backslang spoken by Christine Quarless works with variations of ‘iligili’. In Barrabackslarrabang the voice criss-crosses social borders to reflect the mirroring of structures and desires in ostensibly opposing spaces of language, leg…
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