27/04/2026
Today I am sharing a curatorial text for Verbum Naturae, the opening text of the art book. It is written by Elena Siamionava from TAMAKA, who noted that she completed it in a single uninterrupted flow, allowing the text to emerge without pause.
"What remains of a word after it is spoken? A brief echo in space, or a deep trace in memory? Is it the sound that leaves the trace, the meaning, or the one who spoke it? We are either constantly reinterpreting the spoken word or trying to hold on to what we think is its original meaning and form. But regardless of our efforts—or the complete absence thereof—it gradually changes over time, to the point of disappearing completely. The inevitable entropy of meaning changes the very structure of memory, embedding that old trace of meaning into the convenient fabric of new experiences or completely erasing it.
Verbum naturae—the word spoken by nature—is an attempt to create a universal language, a visual Esperanto, understandable from Brazil to Poland, from Thailand to Belarus. A conlang constructed by artist Mila Kotka is a sequence of bio-hieroglyphs with no semantically fixed meanings, no alphabetical order, and no final point of creation. Focused on inner resonance, they instantly challenge universality, the first and main purpose of any language. Creating an individual semantic space, they turn into a language one speaks to themselves. Having a fixed form but no fixed meaning, a word spoken in the language of nature, in the translation (or rather interpretation) by Mila Kotka, will each time leave a different trace in the language user. Created and fixed a second before their destruction and return to their source, bio-hieroglyphs undergo a full cycle from birth to decay, as dictated by the nature of all phenomena.
The pre-writing archaic nature of Verbum naturae evokes the same primordial, nonverbal response. Recognizing the transience of each unit of this visual language (not on paper or in digital form, but as a physical object), as well as understanding the degree of randomness in their creation, elevates the process of creating compositions from natural components, turning it into an art practice".
