Starting with what seems to be a trivial security check at the entrance to the Tel Aviv airport, Places of Articulation explores a more deeply engraved border, albeit an invisible one, a border that marks our oral cavity and defines the sounds we can emit and the words we can pronounce. We carry with us these sonic and anatomical formations, shaped by our mother-tongue and the environment in which we grew up, becoming ourselves a mobile check-point, wherever we are.

Touring between territories – sonic, anatomical and political ones – the work will bring forward contemporary manifestations of Shibboleth –  a language test determining group belonging – a term that originates in a biblical episode and reaching nowadays language tests in asylum request procedure in Europe.

Using different types of imaging methods and visualizations of the voice and its production, the work renders these territories, borders and checkpoints visible, questions the limits of identification and definitions, revealing blurred lines and zones of ambiguity.

 "And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand."