Painting with letters - Tanja Dückers Lunch Talk @ fortress

After talking about various projects tying together language and how it can be visualised, Tanja Dückers, our author in residence, gets to the core topic of the day,  her very own writing system she calls Autumnish.

Invented 15 years ago as a means to write undisturbed while using public transportation, she studied various writing systems and codes to make up her very own. The name comes from autumn, as this was the season she invented it in, and a word she is quite fond of. She gives "I was bored of writing in roman letters, and I wanted a language of my own. " as another reason to create Autumnish. There are some signs that cover a group of letters, others just single ones. Sometimes she also ends up changing them because she doesn't like the way one of them looks any more. Or, as she puts it, "we don't get along with each other." She also inserts little smilies mirroring how she feels on that particular day to make it even more confusing to the probing eye.

This is as much as she will divulge of her secret, even though some members of the audience plead to be given more information. Instead, she explains how she likes to "use the letters to visualise all my ideas for a novel out of my head, just to see them in front of me." She also writes poems in Autumnish on top of photos, fusing words and image.

Even though people now tend to stare more than ever at those strange and beautiful signs flowing out of her pen, which made her stop using it for everything like she did at some point because she was tired of creating  a spectacle every time she went out shopping, she still likes to use it as a tool for work. It's sometimes quite upsetting that there are people who badly want to crack her code, but then, she doesn't think it will be possible as it simply changed too much during all the time she spent using it.