article on la loko in danish daily information

The snail is friendly, like us!

Line Rosenvinge, Information 15. January 2007

A conversation with artists Daniel Salomon and Olof Olsson about green snails and a language that wants to change the world.

It is easy to learn and was supposed to save the world. Esperanto is an artificial language created by the oculist Ludowik Lazarus Zamenhof, who presented the language in book form in 1887. Since, Esperanto has organized itself into an underground, and it is estimated that the language today is spoken by between 100 000 and 2 million people on all the seven continents.

The internet has further strengthened the expansion. The language is not connected to any specific country or network, and therefore it is being discussed how spread it actually is. Esperanto is a real utopian project, that refuses to die.

Esperanto is also the turning point for a three-year long collaboration between artists Daniel Salomon and Olof Olsson, who graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Arts in 2003 and 2002 respectively. Salomon now lives in London, and Olsson lives in Copenhagen. They work under the heading La Loko, which means ‘the Place’ in Esperanto. Paradoxically, the artists work in any other way than site-specific. The project unfolds as a procession of activities. Olsson:

“We are interested in ways to imagine the site that not are based on national chauvinism and Blut-und-Boden politics.”

Salomon adds: “I think, that what is most important for us as artists is to create images that reflect the world. We use Esperanto as an unusual way to decode various phenomena in society.”

- How did La Loko start?

Salomon: “The first concrete project was in my Vesterbro apartment in 2004, where we wanted to create a site with events every Saturday—everything from an electro-pop concert to an Esperanto course and cooking. We did it completely without a budget.”

Neutrality as ideal

The artists worked during the week and presented something new every Saturday, as an exhibition with a series of events. It became a friendly meeting place, where activities were communicated through a work of art, and where people in an informal way became familiar with Esperanto. In 2005 they carried out another ambitious project in a sitcom-performance for Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art, with professional actors, who never before had worked in Esperanto. The artists wanted to let an ideal world meet a commercial one, represented by the sitcom and entertainment television for the masses.

- Why this interest in Esperanto?

Salomon: “We are not happy about the fact that globalisation means the expansion of American language and culture at the cost of all the others. Esperanto is a good proposal for a neutral lingua franca. It is easy to learn, it is a beautiful and well functioning living language, and it does not belong to any specific language or culture. But we choose to promote it in a very laid-back way. When we meet doubt about Esperanto, it is important that we do not overwhelm people with our enthusiasm, so as to seem aggressive.”

Sausages without borders

It is only natural that the artists work for an Esperanto team to qualify for the World Cup in South Africa in 2010. They see an interesting contrast between the professional billion-dollar giant represented by FIFA’s entertainment industry, and the idealistic Esperanto movement.

As they put it: “An Esperanto Football team stands for international football without national chauvinism.”

In 2006, the artists went to the Living Art Museum in Reykjavik in order to launch a sausage company under the heading ‘Kolbasoj sen Limoj’, which in Esperanto means ‘sausages without borders’. Olsson and Salomon served hotdogs with organic lamb meat on the opening day, which coincided with the national day of Iceland.

The artists realised a friendly provocation by guesting a country and serve their national dish, the hotdog, freed from the nationally specific.

Other projects have been the prototype for an Esperanto fast-food chain restaurant OVO at the Copenhagen exhibition space Appendiks, where they only sold eggs. They also seriously work with their international network and have among other things arranged a Thai-Esperanto friendship conference in Bangkok, and they recently started a collaboration with the cultural centre Beursschouwburg in Brussels.

A peace movement

“If one looks at the history of Esperanto, it is obvious that Zamenhof was interested in working actively for peace. He developed Esperanto and founded a peace movement, but chose to separate the two, so that Esperanto became a tool people could learn to use for many different reasons. Thereby he could indirectly create peace, if everyone were able to speak the same language. He realized that if there would be too much talk about ideology and content, Esperanto would not proliferate so much. That’s why he consciously separated them,” explains Olsson.

- You work with Esperanto as visual artists. How?

Salomon: “We often chose to present ourselves either as ambassadors or as a company, with all the formal conventions that go by that. Often not very much is needed; a flag, a business suit or a certain jargon. Some people are a little bit confused, because we don’t necessarily announce our projects as art.“

- Tell about you snail logo.

Salomon: “It took us a year to make that logo. The snail is friendly, like us. It is in contrast to most other logos, which often express speed and strength. In that way it is somewhat of an anti-logo. And the snail carries its own house—that’s a beautiful metaphor for the ability to feel at home everywhere. In Esperanto one would say “ĉie hejme”. The snail is green, as is the symbol of Esperanto, the green star. The five points of the star symbolise the five continents, and the green symbolises hope.”

And may hope longe live, and the belief that we through communication create understanding and peace.

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