The Engender Project series (2022) consequently offers a range of personal pronouns in English and French (she, he, il, elle) by visually crossing and by its locution and diction the passages or the straddling of words that can both dissolve them in a growing lack of distinction and mark their clear separation, depending on the reading or enunciation meaning. What linguists call the "double articulation," the first comprising monemes, the smallest units of meaning, and the second, phoneme, which make it possible to distinguish one moneme from another (la/ma, for example). Because the double articulation is specific to any human language, it is obvious to anyone that for the two languages chosen here this idea is to be taken literally and figuratively, since it distinguishes as much as it articulates the human and grammatical gender(s) socially laid claim to for quite some time. The title of the piece and the "project" (In danger) can moreover be understood as "putting in gender", like "putting in danger."

As human language is also generally linked to infinitely small transitions between sound and meaning, this even more so when it is pushed rather far (he.she/i.elle), in a number of videos and installations, Gary Hill has manipulated, deformed, exaggerated these possibilities - notably by reading aloud texts backwards filmed as such and then projected backwards to recover the initial meaning - to the point of often producing abstract language, in the same way as abstract painting exists. But as Picasso remarked concerning this genre or style, painting of nothing does not exist; and neither does sound of nothing, and sound, even when very reduced, sometimes to a single letter (the distinctive units of phenomes, tu/ta), or to an ordinary street noise (tires screeching) can be understood and interpreted according to a certain meaning.

Jacinto Lageira, november 2022