An LED screen, ninety centimetres long, rests directly on the floor, low enough that one has to look down to read it. White points of light run from right to left, .bar.bar.bar., without beginning or end, reflected in the polished boards around it. It has the look of a public display, the ticker of a train station or a stock exchange, a device made to deliver information. But nothing is announced. The screen repeats a sound that was never meant to say anything.
The word barbarian comes from the Greek βάρβαρος. In its traditional explanation, it imitates what foreign speech sounded like to Greek ears: bar, bar, bar, an indistinct succession of syllables with no structure and no meaning. Before it came to suggest cruelty, ignorance or savagery, the word described nothing more than a language one could not follow. Over time, a failure of listening hardened into a judgement about the people who spoke.
The work belongs to Chez Nausicaa, the dinners Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos hosted in Athens for locals, refugees and travellers from eleven countries, many of whom shared no common language. Around those tables, conversation passed through gestures, fragments of English, translation from one guest to another, and long moments of not understanding. Language was the first border every guest crossed, often before saying their name.
The screen holds that border in place. The person called a barbarian was never the one who failed to speak, but the one the listener failed to understand; yet the word falls on the speaker, never on the limits of the one who hears. By reducing all foreign speech to a single scrolling syllable, the work makes this asymmetry visible. What seems meaningless on the screen is not the language of the other, but the listener's position, presented as if it were neutral.
The English title turns the situation once more. To say that something is all Greek to me is to call it incomprehensible, so that the language of those who first heard bar bar bar in others has itself become the proverbial example of what cannot be understood. The familiar and the foreign trade places depending on where one stands. Shown in Athens, in a Greek house of hospitality, the work lets each visitor discover on which side of the screen they happen to be.
The light keeps running at floor level, patient and indifferent, while people step around it. It asks less what the others are saying than how long we are willing to listen before deciding they are saying nothing.
