“Mother-tongue” is a series of blind-embossed paper collages that draws on early modern palimpsests as models for inscription, erasure, and memory. The series belongs to a larger body of work based on archeological sites that have played strategic roles in the cultural crosscurrents of the Mediterranean Basin.

The project fuses the sites of pre-literate civilization using a site footprint as a starting point and in combination with twenty-first century texts that grapple with the erasure of cultural traditions. The forms for “Mother-tongue” are based on several sites, called nuraghe, built on the island of Sardinia between 1900-730 BCE. In its collage imagery, “Mother-tongue” incorporates handwritten facsimiles of the poetry of Sardinian writer Antonella Anedda (1955- ) printed on transparent paper. Anedda writes in Italian and Lugodorese, derived from Latin with incorporated elements of Byzantine Greek, Catalan and Castilian. I bind the embossed paper to these words with silk thread, fusing ancient protectorates to the contemporary pluralities of Sardinia’s geography and language.