Potential Wor(l)ds is a workshop using sound, mark-making and science fiction with artists Aliyah Hussain and Anna Bunting Branch. Exploring how to navigate and push against pre-defined words and worlds – and how to make our own spaces, on our own terms. Using science fiction as a tool to explore experimental modes of communicating and different ways of world-building, artists Anna Bunting Branch and Aliyah Hussain’s host a workshop to think about how to define what we want and need on our own terms and in our own words.

Aliyah and Anna introduce how feminist science fiction has informed their art practices, their interests in how narratives, histories and visions of the future are constructed – and who gets to define them. They introduce Láadan, a feminist language created by writer Suzette Haden Elgin in 1982. Finding herself unable to express certain ideas and emotions in English, Elgin wanted Láadan to make space for new words and ways of communicating.

Taking Elgin’s prompt of ‘there ought to be a word…’ as a starting point, the Potential Wor(l)ds workshop uses contact mics, printmaking and experimental sound-making to collectively create new terms, labels, words and demands for making our own worlds..