Stuttering can create time, New York
As the collective People Who Stutter Create, we mobilised the Whitney’s exhibition billboard as a place to publicly celebrate the transformational space of dysfluency, a term that can encompass stuttering/stammering and other communication differences such as aphasia, Tourette’s, and dysarthria.
Read more about the project on the whitney museum’s website.
artwork description
Three lines of black text appear on a light seafoam green background, in Spanish, Chinese and English, translating to: ‘Stuttering can create time.’ The text is in a sans serif typeface organized in three straight lines within the top half of the composition. The bottom half of the composition is empty. The text is stretched and repeated to represent stammering.
process
collective video calls
We met as a collective to discuss what the billboard design could be. From the beginning it was clear we wanted to feature some kind of statement. jjjjjerome explored various typographic layouts and statements.
Design decisions
The design is inspired by the work of Jenny Holzer and Alisha B. Wormsley. Both have used striking statements in their work along with typographic simplicity. We used the typeface Dysfluent Mono, which emulates or represents stuttering in typographic form.
The lowercase typography is intentional: we wanted the statements feeling warm, welcoming, accessible and familiar, like a text from a friend. We used the green background colour to give a quality of warmth that stark black and white may not be able to provide. Green has long been used in the stuttering community worldwide as a point of representation. previous billboards featured beautiful photographs, paintings and other image-based artworks, so we wanted our billboard to be more minimal so the statement would be the main takeaway.
Choice of languages
considering the culturally and linguistically diverse nature of our collective, we had the idea early on to render the statement in multiple languages. Much of the work of stuttering pride and other stuttering-affirming activism is mainly english-speaking, so it was important to us that the billboard spoke to a global audience. we decided to go for the three most widely-spoken languages in New York, to complement the three kinds of stuttering. We worked with translators and a Mandarin typographic consultant to ensure the statement worked in each language. We also used this as an opportunity to make the statement appear slightly differently in each language, to reflect the variable and shifting nature of stuttering itself.
Spanish
‘Stuttering offers time’
English
‘Stuttering can create time’
Mandarin
‘People who stutter create time’
events
I wanna be with you everywhere – Summer Solstic
Performance Space New York, 150 First Avenue
New York City, 21 June 2024
In I wanna be with you everywhere’s (IWBWYE) own words, it is “a celebration of nonlocality, roaming, peripatetic (traveling) passions. It’s a stranded, stuck, slowed, stop-time love scene. 2024’s Summer Solstice launches our upcoming K/Crip School pilot with deepened invocations from kin and collectives. Our study is the get together. There won’t really be an end as this is actually just the beginning (again), third round around, encore before—in continual rehearsal.”
People Who Stutter Create (PWSC) performed for the first time publicly at the Summer Solstice event. JJJJJerome Ellis led the collective with a combination of song, music and poetry. Conor Foran followed with a debut poetry performance: he repeated ‘I’ for a few minutes as a callback to an early stammering experience. Kristel Kubart, Delicia Daniels and Jia Bin joined on Zoom, and each performed poetry and read a passage of text about their personal experiences of stammering. PWSC was grateful to be part of this hybrid event that celebrated disability through art in an accessible, multi-realm space.
Read more about the event and full credits list.
Celebrating Stuttering Voices
The High Line at Gansevoort Street,New York City 27 June 2024
Celebrating Stuttering Voices featured readings and conversation by People Who Stutter Create (PWSC) collective—JJJJJerome Ellis, Jia Bin, Delicia Daniels, Conor Foran, and Kristel Kubart—interspersed with occasional musical interludes by Ellis. Through repeated sounds, prolonged sounds, and blocks with no sound, PWSC aims to describe and transform social reality. Celebrating Stuttering Voices will offer an intimate opportunity to create room for deep listening, understanding, and collaboration.
credits
| Contributor | Jia Bin |
|---|---|
| Contributor | Delicia Daniels |
| Founder | JJJJJerome Ellis |
| Designer | Conor Foran |
| Contributor | Kristel Kubart |
| Mandarin | Jia Bin |
|---|---|
| English | JJJJJerome ellis |
| Spanish | Angelica Bernabe |
| Spanish | Argenis Ovalles |
| Spanish | James Harrison Monaco |
| Spanish | Wendy Palomeque |
| Gallery | Whitney Museum |
|---|---|
| Curator | Chrissie Iles |
| Curator | Meg Onli |
| Gallery | The High Line |
| Curator | Taylor Zakarin |
| Assisstant curator | Constanza Valenzuela |
| ASL artist | Brandon Kazen-Maddox |
| Mandarin typography consultant | Zoe (Yu) Cui |
| Typeface: Dysfluent Mono | Conor Foran |
| Typeface: Glow Sans TC | Celestial Phineas |
