Esse arts + opinions is a bilingual contemporary art magazine publishing primarily critical analyses and essays on current artistic practices. Submissions for the thematic section (1,500 to 2,000 words) must be sent in DOCX or RTF format to redaction@esse.ca by April 1, 2026. Please include a short biographical notice (35 words) as well as your e-mail and mailing address. Persons wishing to first submit a note of intent (250-500 words) are invited to do so before January 10, 2026. No notes of intent will be read after this date, but it is still possible to submit a final text by the issue deadline (April 1, 2026).

Please consult the editorial policy and the writing protocol before submitting your text.

Soft, moist, and flexible, tongues are muscles that allow for flavour detection, licking, singing or speech. Tongues also refer to linguistic community systems of vocal and graphic signs which form words, sentences, and meaning. This dual ability to function as both an anatomical gustatory device and a sound-modulating one gives rise to a plethora of tongue-centred idioms, but it also frames the tongue as the last frontier between an inner thought and its outward expression, between self and other.

In more than one way, tongues are the vehicles through which we can relate to alterity, be it temporally or geographically distant. From Sanskrit, to Tamil, to Aramaic, ancient tongues carry the echoes and reverberations of primeval stories and the knowledge and wisdom embedded in them. “When myths arrive into our present,” art historian Salar Mameni writes, “what we sense is the gap between now and then. Time becomes stretched like the tongue that delivers the myth.¹; While decipherable ancient tongues can connect the living with those who came before us, undeciphered ones become abstracted, symbols-abound. Like art, they carry the paradoxical power to generate experiences beyond language, where meaning arises through visceral sensation.

Equally primordial is the pleasure derived from licking. Orality, desires, and sensuality: tongue-centred works tend to play up sexual pleasures. Diverting from cis-centred penetration-oriented sexual fantasies, tongues are—on a more sensory and haptic level—deeply enmeshed in non-phallic libidinal economies. Licking has a distinct subversive quality for sexual expression, deep-rooted desires and pleasures, which resurfaces in Sapphic art practices, among other genres.

Shrouded in an aura of mystery and sacrality, glossolalia—or “speaking in tongues,” in Pentecostal and charismatic Christian traditions—refers to speech-like syllables whose meaning is known by neither the entranced speaker nor the audience. A highly contested psychological condition, xenoglossy, defines the act of entering trance-like states in which they speak in a foreign language without having previously learnt or studied it. It is this perplexing phenomenon that has influenced visual and performance artists whose xenoglossy allows them to explore the full potential of intuitions and reawaken subconscious knowledge. Reminiscent of Futurist poetry, Claude Gauvreau’s automatist poetry, and asemic writing, entirely made-up or hybridized tongues can allow for the playful deconstruction of languages to fully appreciate the sonorities that go unnoticed in day-to-day speech.

Beyond sacred and playful devices, tongues are also intergenerational memory holders. In colonial contexts, however, tongues have been disrupted to the point of becoming unrecognizable. What happens when two tongues meet and intersect and when, as a result, new tongues emerge? It is often against the backdrop of colonial encounters that indigenous and settler tongues agonistically coalesce. Settler language policies and laws—emerging from political systems entrenched in racial hierarchies—are historically to blame for marginalizing indigenous languages. The philosopher Rada Iveković comments on the shift, following globalization, from local tongues to an oppressive, global, and hegemonic colonial tongue.² This has led to a countermovement in which the resurgence and revitalization of indigenous languages, and their incursion into contemporary art, is gaining significant traction.

For this issue, Esse arts + opinions seeks texts that explore the polysemic quality of tongues in contemporary art. We welcome propositions that approach tongues from an anatomical perspective, as a muscle that can modulate many sounds, as a pleasure-giving device, as languages, as sacred sounds, and more. What role do tongues play in art? Which power structures loosen tongues, which tie them up, and how are these structures reflected in contemporary works? How does art engage with language revitalization?

Consult the editorial policy and the writing protocol.

¹ Salar Mameni, “Pazuzu,” in Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023), 137.
² Rada Iveković, “Langue coloniale, langue globale, langue locale,” Rue Descartes, no. 58 (November 2007): 26-36.