Exhibition at the APT Gallery, Deptford London UK

September 2018

An excerpt from the Esperanto Association of Great Britain Update Number 20 for February / March 2003:

“Muriel Shackleton from Bradford writes:

On Saturday 9th November 2002, Keighley Esperanto Society and the Yorkshire Federation celebrated 100 years of Esperanto in Keighley, where the first Esperanto Group in England was formed by Joseph Rhodes.

Dr. Ian Dewhirst, a well-known local historian, unveiled a bust of Zamenhof, carved by Keighley member Eric Buckley. This is now in Keighley Library alongside the memorial to Joseph Rhodes. Dr. Dewhirst also gave a short after-dinner speech on Keighley and the formation of the Esperanto Society 100 years ago.

A celebratory cake was cut by the president of the Keighley Group, Audrey Duerden, the president of the Yorkshire Federation, Brian O’Sullivan, and Dr. Dewhirst, guest speaker.

Graham Blakey was present, representing Esperanto Association of Britain and it was heart warming to see individual members who had taken the trouble to travel from Cumbria, Wales, Lancashire and Cheshire and from the northern and southern limits of Yorkshire to support this event.”

The work included in the More in Common exhibition covers a series of typographic narratives produced in response to an idea (the Utopian promise of an auxiliary international language), and its concrete manifestations: both the community of the Esperanto society which was formed in Keighley in 1902 and two books, objects that are still held within the town’s Reference Library.

Ideas of translation, transcription, interpretation and instrumentalisation are key to the work’s approach and, in terms of typography and visible language, they form the basis of systems and processes which underpin its production.