In her seven-minute silent video installation How to Destroy Language, Aylin Alakbarli does not raise her voice. Instead, she disassembles language quietly.
Presented in a vertical format and divided into a grid of moving images, the work unfolds through fragments. Each cell contains a gesture: cutting, unbraiding, repetition, distortion. Together, they form a visual system that mirrors the structural fragility of language itself. Alakbarli constructs this divided screen in order to show how alphabets, like bodies, can be split, reorganized, and rendered unstable.
The piece is rooted in the turbulent history of the Azerbaijani alphabet. In the 20th century alone, Azerbaijan’s script changed three times: from Arabic to Latin in the 1920s, from Latin to Cyrillic during Soviet rule, and from Cyrillic back to Latin after independence. These were not aesthetic adjustments. They were political acts. Each shift disrupted generational continuity. Grandparents became unreadable to grandchildren. Libraries became inaccessible. Memory fractured across scripts.
Alakbarli created How to Destroy Language in order to examine how the first step in dismantling a culture is often the disruption of its language. Rather than dramatizing destruction, she focuses on quieter mechanisms: censorship, translation, technological neglect, bureaucratic reform. The work asks what happens when the architecture of communication is slowly restructured, and who holds the authority to rewrite it.
Throughout the installation, culturally significant elements appear and transform.
A pomegranate, a symbol deeply embedded in Azerbaijani identity, associated with fertility, multiplicity, and continuity — is slowly cut open. Alakbarli performs this gesture to visualize fragmentation from within. The fruit does not explode; it separates. The seeds remain intact, but the structure that once held them together is altered.
In another sequence, braids are undone and redone repeatedly. The braid becomes a metaphor for lineage and transmission. By unweaving and reweaving it, Alakbarli illustrates rupture and reconstruction, the careful labor required to restore continuity after disruption.
The gestures are intimate and deliberate. Within the grid structure, repetition transforms them into systems. The body becomes both agent and archive.
The video is entirely silent. Alakbarli removes sound in order to foreground absence, what cannot be spoken, archived, or translated. The silence becomes a structural device, mirroring the experience of encountering a text written in an unfamiliar script.
The vertical format subtly references contemporary digital interfaces. Language today lives on screens, in compressed files, social platforms, translation algorithms. By adopting the proportions of the smartphone, Alakbarli situates her work within the same technological systems that can both preserve and erode cultural memory.
How to Destroy Language was exhibited during the Nasimi Festival at Shirvanshahs’ Palace (Shirvanshahlar Sarayı), Azerbaijan’s oldest museum site. Installed within historic stone architecture that has endured centuries of political change, the work entered into dialogue with its surroundings, permanence confronting instability.
The installation was presented alongside members of Atash Hub, a collective of artists who engage critically and collaboratively with Azerbaijani cultural heritage. Within this context, Alakbarli’s work functioned not only as reflection but as responsibility.
Ultimately, How to Destroy Language situates language between power and vulnerability. Alphabets emerge as both political instruments and fragile architectures of memory. Through quiet gestures of dismantling and repair, Alakbarli asks: Who has the power to write history, and who risks becoming unreadable?
Link for the video: https://www.aylin.works/how-to-destroy-language
