Jesse Darling

Jesse Darling’s Mene Mene consists of a series of graphic posters spelling out messages in Bliss symbols, which can be translated by reading the work’s titles. Blissymbolics is a communication system originally developed as a utopian project by Charles K. Bliss (1897-1985) during WWII. Inspired by Chinese pictographics, Bliss hoped that his ‘semantographs’ would help to facilitate democratic international communication through a non-spoken language. Today, Blissymbolics is used mainly in Special Needs education. Darling’s posters can be read sequentially. The phrases are ambiguously officious instead of straightforwardly emancipatory, which Darling importantly considers a way to question the efficiency of legislative language supposed to support or accommodate difference and disability.

yellow: [in] this language
blue: actions speak louder than words
red: speech is never free
green: silence is golden
graffiti: nothing about us without us