Code-Switching Cartographies: Sound, Language, and Ancestral Resistance in Intermedia Practice

This presentation emerges from CodesWitcher, an intermedia artistic research project that investigates how diasporic and minoritized identities can be reclaimed through visual, sonic, and linguistic practice. Grounded in Stuart Hall’s “encoding/decoding,” W.E.B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness,” and Nick Mirzoeff’s critique of visuality as a regime of colonial power, the project examines how representation structures who is seen, heard, and remembered.

Mirzoeff argues that visuality historically legitimized empire by determining what could be made visible and intelligible. In response, I approach code-switching as a form of countervisuality: a strategy that unsettles dominant mappings of race, land, and belonging. Through painting, sound installation, and immersive media, I rework inherited archives and endangered languages into speculative cartographies of resistance.

The presentation focuses on two interlinked works. Titles of Land _ The Map Folds consists of ancestral landscapes painted on folded brown parcel paper, invoking colonial cartography while destabilizing its authority through bilingual titling in Gaeilge and Muscogee Creek. Language Lessons is a sound installation layering ancestral testimony with beginner language recordings, performing code-switching as embodied recovery rather than assimilation.

Together, these works reframe language as material practice and voice as epistemic infrastructure. By moving between visual and sonic registers, the project claims what Mirzoeff calls “the right to look”—and extends it to a right to speak, to remember, and to remap. I propose code-switching as both a method and medium for engaging endangered conceptual worlds in contemporary artistic research.