Shapereader
Artwork from the VIERNULVIER Collection
Artist: Ilan Manouach | (GR) | 2021
Greek avant-garde artist Ilan Manouach was a guest in our Balzaal for three residencies amid the Covid-19 pandemic, in 2020, 2021 and 2022. As an artist in residence, he invited performers from different musical backgrounds to explore how sound could be stimulated by touch. They began working with ‘Shapereader’, a universal non-alphabetic communication system developed by Manouach for visually impaired readers and comic book creators with the ambition of supporting them in the creation of tactile stories.
Through a simple ‘reading principle’, the system can connect tactile symbols with meanings, which are independent of ethnic or indigenous alphabets or Braille writing. The design, based on simple principles and easy-to-remember shapes, is intended to be accessible to all, regardless of nationality, language, education level, life situation, or visual impairment.
During Manouach’s time at VIERNULVIER, the system was translated into an architectural wall installation. Workshops then took place where musicians used ‘Shapereader’ as an alternative musical score to write new compositions that are not be read visually, but literally felt.
Consisting of 28 panels, the installation in the Brugzaal can be read as an abstract monochrome artwork, but is at the same time the residue of a unique project at the intersection between visual art and experimental music.
Ilan Manouach is a researcher, musician and multidisciplinary artist with a particular interest in conceptual and post-digital comics. Manouach received his PhD from Aalto University in Helsinki and is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University. He is the founder of Echo Chamber, a Brussels-based non-profit organisation whose mission is to document, archive and fund radical artistic practices in contemporary comics. Manouach works as a librarian for the Conceptual Comics Collections at Ubuweb and Monoskop, has been appointed as an expert in experimental comics by the Belgian government for its national public funding programme (CCAP), and works as a strategy consultant for the Onassis Foundation.