When Hannah Arendt introduced the concept of vita activa in The Human Condition (Arendt 1958), she established a threefold division of human activity: labour, work, and action. Among these, it is action that most directly engages with plurality, publicness, and the condition of appearing before others. Crucially, action is bound to speech. “Action without speech,” Arendt argues, “would lose its revelatory character and be no less mute than labour” (Arendt 1958, 178). Speech is not an accessory to thought, but the vehicle through which action gains political and existential weight.

The exhibition Designo ergo sum—language as visible action emerges from this interrelation between speech and action. It takes Arendt’s conception of language as a performative core of political life as its theoretical axis while proposing a curatorial extension of this idea: that writing, when enacted materially, visually, and gesturally, constitutes a mode of appearance in its own right. Language is not only spoken—it is drawn, fractured, mirrored, and inscribed. It is not solely what we use to communicate, but what constitutes us as acting subjects.

In Arendt’s reading, writing is largely excluded from the political ontology of action. She privileges speech for its immediacy, spontaneity, and dialogic presence, while viewing writing as mediated and belated. This exhibition challenges that hierarchy. As Jacques Derrida has argued, the privileging of speech over writing—phonocentrism—is itself a political gesture, one that displaces the archive, the trace, and the inscription as passive residues of thought (Derrida 1996). Yet, it is precisely through such traces that political power is exercised, remembered, and contested. The visual field, in this context, becomes a site not only of expression but of intervention.

Nives Widauer’s artistic language operates within this expanded field of action. Her works are not illustrations of linguistic ideas but enactments of inscription. Mirrors bearing engraved verbs, drawings composed of typographic fragments, and aphoristic phrases rendered in coloured pencil—all these elements mobilize language as spatial event. They transform words from semantic carriers into performative forces. The act of writing—etched, mirrored, drawn, traced—becomes a gesture of appearance, a means of making the self visible in, and through relation.

Widauer’s approach reconfigures the terms of Arendt’s vita activa. If speech discloses the self, then inscription, too, can enact presence—not despite its materiality, but through it. Judith Butler writes, “to appear is to exercise a certain performative claim” (Butler 2015, 11). The works in this exhibition claim space through the visual operations of language. They assert not only that language acts, but that acts of writing are themselves appearances—claims, confrontations, invitations.

This curatorial premise insists that visual inscription is not antithetical to political action but a modality of it. In Widauer’s works, writing exceeds its communicative function and becomes a performative architecture: a spatial articulation of thought, subjectivity, and presence. As such, Designo ergo sum extends Arendt’s concept of action into the realm of drawing, mark-making, and visual language—where writing is no longer a secondary residue of speech but its radical counterpart.

If, as Arendt proposes, speech is a form of action, then inscription must be reclaimed not as derivative but as an original modality of agency. In Nives Widauer’s work, writing is not secondary to speech—it is action. Her practice shifts attention from dialogic immediacy to visual trace, from utterance to material language. She dislodges the word from its semantic utility and reinscribes it into the realm of form, gesture, and spatial presence.

This is particularly evident in her VoiceOver and Venus series, where language is rendered in hand-drawn typography on black paper, often juxtaposed with anatomical or zoological imagery. Aphoristic phrases—“All communication must lead to change,” “If you wish to converse with me, define your terms,” or “The limits of my language are the limits of my mind”—are inscribed letter by letter, not typed but drawn. Their typographic irregularities—uneven spacing, trembling lines, chromatic dissonance—are not aesthetic deficiencies, but conceptual strategies. The act of inscription becomes a bodily operation: to draw language is to embody it.

This corporeal dimension aligns with Amelia Jones’s account of the “radical performativity of inscription,” in which writing is not the representation of thought but its material trace, its affective residue (Jones 2012). Widauer’s works enact this principle: each word is a gesture, each phrase a site of embodied articulation. The hand does not illustrate—it asserts. It transforms the text into a space of encounter.

Widauer’s mirror objects follow a similar logic. Here, short words and fragmented commands are engraved directly into reflective surfaces: “Why,” “Not,” “Know Yourself.” These are not captions—they are disruptions. The mirror becomes less a surface of recognition than a field of semantic interference. The viewer sees themselves only through language. The reflective image is fractured, overlaid with utterance.

This dynamic invokes Judith Butler’s performativity: “to appear is to exercise a certain performative claim” (Butler 2015, 11). Widauer’s mirror inscriptions are such claims. They do not describe—they act. They challenge the neutrality of the mirror, turning it from a vehicle of self-image into an apparatus of address. This mechanism of interpellation recalls Althusser’s notion of ideological hailing (Althusser 1971): the viewer is not merely reflected but called into subjecthood by the text. The inscription becomes a sentence in both grammatical and existential sense.

Such works also engage feminist genealogies of markmaking. As Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker argued, the intimate, the hand-drawn, the ornamental have long been coded as feminine and thus devalued (Parker and Pollock 1981). Widauer reclaims these registers not as resistance to high art but as strategies of political presence. Her practice insists on particularity, on the situatedness of language as form.

The Venus drawings further entangle language and corporeality. Coloured pencil forms hover between anatomical figuration and abstract ornament: uterine structures, vascular lines, gestural traces. Their semiotic instability evokes Julia Kristeva’s notion of the chora, a pre-linguistic field of drives and rhythms that precedes structured meaning (Kristeva 1980). Widauer renders this space not in theory but in line and pigment. Her language is not definitive—it is gestural, affective, and processual.

In this, her practice resonates with post-war artists who blurred the boundaries of drawing and writing: Cy Twombly’s gestural notations, Mira Schendel’s translucent text drawings, and Hanne Darboven’s serial scripts. But where these often tend toward abstraction or accumulation, Widauer’s works remain intimate, propositional, and contingent. Each piece is a small act of speech—not monumental but relational.

This relationality is also spatial. Her inscriptions occupy paper and mirror not as surfaces of representation, but as zones of appearance. They recalibrate the viewer’s position: reading becomes a form of moving, seeing, being seen. The mirror demands angle and alignment. The drawing demands attention and care. Meaning is not immediate—it emerges through choreography.

Widauer’s inscriptions are neither declarations nor messages. They resist semantic closure. In Derridean terms, they enact différance—they defer, dislocate, and reverberate (Derrida 1972). Language, in her practice, is not a system of control but a field of orientation. Or, as Sara Ahmed would put it, an “affective orientation”—a way of turning toward the world (Ahmed 2006). The drawn word is not just seen; it is felt.

What emerges is a grammar of inscription: a syntax of gesture, reflection, and typographic embodiment. Widauer’s writing is not secondary to visuality—it constitutes its condition. To inscribe is to act. To write is to appear. And in this curatorial framework, language becomes the visible form of presence.

Among the most persistent motifs in Nives Widauer’s work is the mirror: a reflective surface that does not merely show but speaks. In these pieces, language is inscribed—engraved, drawn, or traced—directly onto the glass. The mirror no longer functions as a site of recognition or self-image; it becomes a medium of address, a linguistic threshold where subject and reflection collide.

Widauer’s mirror works do not invite passive viewing. They require movement, alignment, and proximity. To read the word is to reposition the body. The viewer enters a choreography of meaning—one in which text and reflection intersect, displace, and refract one another. This performative entanglement echoes Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of perception as an embodied negotiation, a gestural act (Merleau-Ponty 1962). One does not merely perceive these works—one performs them.

The phrases inscribed—“Know yourself,” “Why not,” “I am 60, and I like it”—are neither explanatory nor didactic. They oscillate between irony and affirmation, opacity and provocation. Their syntax is fragmented, elliptical. In this, Widauer’s mirrors diverge from the declarative commands of Barbara Kruger or the rhetorical propositions of Jenny Holzer. Instead of presenting typographic authority, they offer linguistic aperture. The viewer is not directed—they are implicated.

This implicature constitutes a politics of address. The mirror becomes a space of interpellation, echoing Althusser’s theory that subjects are constituted through being hailed by language (Althusser 1971). Widauer’s viewers are not merely spectators—they are grammatically positioned. The reflected body is absorbed into the sentence structure; subject, verb, and pronoun converge in the act of looking. On the mirror’s surface, to see oneself is also to be spoken.

Judith Butler’s notion of performative speech further illuminates this operation. Language, Butler argues, does not merely represent—it does. It enacts and produces social realities (Butler 1997). In Widauer’s case, the act of inscription becomes such a performative gesture. The engraved word alters the function of the object, transforms the gaze, and reorients subjectivity. The mirror is no longer a passive reflector—it becomes a field of political emergence.

These strategies resonate with feminist histories of mirror-based practices. From Joan Jonas’s Mirror Pieces to VALIE EXPORT’s reflexive body actions, the mirror has been used to contest gendered regimes of vision. Widauer’s approach is quieter, more interior, yet equally disruptive. Her mirrors do not stage spectacle—they elicit introspection. But in doing so, they mobilize a politics of visibility—not in what is shown, but in how language reframes what seeing means.

This reframing includes the mirrors’ objecthood. Often antique, ornate, or domestic in origin, they carry histories of décor and interiority. Widauer intervenes in these histories by adding language—not as label or caption, but as fissure. The decorative is not erased; it is overwritten. The domestic becomes discursive. This gesture recalls Hélène Cixous’s notion of écriture féminine—a writing that disrupts phallic order by inscribing multiplicity, ambiguity, and bodily resonance (Cixous 1975).

Moreover, Widauer’s mirrors stage a temporal ambiguity. The reflected image is instantaneous, but the inscription lingers. The text loops—echoing, interrupting, returning. As Derrida’s concept of différance suggests, meaning is never present in full, but always deferred, displaced (Derrida 1972). Widauer’s mirror language acts within this deferral. It is visible, yet elusive. Legible, yet unstable.

This logic of visual deferral also underpins the ANNA series. Drawn in waxy, coloured pencil on clean white paper, ANNA works with a vocabulary of reduction. The schematic face becomes a site of condensation: a hand that occludes the mouth (ANNA II), a vaginal slit replacing the lips (ANNA V), a pink moustache floating below bifurcated cheeks (ANNA VI). These visual insertions do not clarify—they interrupt. They operate like linguistic redactions: silencing, shifting, displacing. The face becomes a mask, and the mask becomes a sentence: a field of signification that withholds more than it reveals. Echoing the feminist lineage of re-signifying faciality—from Claude Cahun to Cindy Sherman—Widauer’s drawings unfix identity and overwrite its visibility. Like Widauer’s mirrors, these drawings stage appearance as obstruction. They mobilize visual syntax not to stabilize identity, but to fracture it. 

Some of these mirrors are embedded in furniture-like structures—tables, consoles, stands—engraved with hands, lines, or symbols. These additions extend the logic of inscription into the spatial realm. The mirror is not isolated—it becomes part of a larger semiotic system. The hand, often repeated as motif, indexes the act of writing itself: the authoring body as agent of form.

In this way, the mirrors enact the very proposition of Designo ergo sum – language as visible action. They exemplify how inscription is not descriptive, but operative. They do not present reflection as identity, but as linguistic emergence. The self is not seen—it is spoken. Language displaces recognition. What the viewer encounters is not a reflection of who they are, but a sentence in which they are implicated.

Widauer’s mirror acts thus stage a counter-image to the digital self. In an age of algorithmic visibility and instrumentalised self-presentation, these works slow perception down. They disrupt the selfie logic of the contemporary mirror. They reintroduce friction—semantic, bodily, relational. As Hannah Arendt warned in The Crisis in Culture, the erosion of the space of appearance threatens the possibility of political life (Arendt 1961). Widauer’s mirrors reclaim this space, not through spectacle, but through linguistic intimacy.

Here, the act of writing returns to its etymological core: designare—to trace, to mark. In Widauer’s hands, this becomes a curatorial grammar. To inscribe is to act. To mirror is to address. To write is to alter perception. And in this alteration, presence emerges.

In the eponymous series Designo ergo sum, Nives Widauer materializes the central thesis of the exhibition—that writing is a mode of appearance—through a visually rigorous yet conceptually ironic installation. Fifty small-format panels, evenly framed and presented on a black background, combine photographic reproductions of classical busts with hand-drawn white line bodies rendered in coloured pencil. The selected heads—among them Aristotle, Sophocles, Euripides, and Pericles—stem from the Greco-Roman sculptural canon. These historically idealized portraits of philosophers, poets, and rulers serve as visual condensations of logos: reason is localized in the head, and subjectivity is sculpturally fixed (Belting 1994).

Widauer disrupts this logic with a double gesture: on one hand, she opposes the monumentalized portrait with a deliberately reductive, almost typographic body; on the other, she activates the pictorial surface as a site of inscription. The white line functions not as contour but as statement. The body is not depicted—it is written.

The resulting hybrids oscillate between anthropological typology and typographic permutation. The white figures seem less anatomically observed than derived from a visual alphabet—a vocabulary of gestures, poses, and movements. Some raise their arms, some stride forwards, others squat or fold inwards. Their relation to the photographed head is not mimetic but relational. Between portrait and body drawing, a productive rupture opens: one seeks to fix, the other to vary.

This tension activates a core motif in Widauer’s work: the difference between representation and appearance. The classical bust—photographically reproduced, iconographically coded—stands for the historically authorized subject. The drawn body, by contrast, refuses identifiability. Its schematic simplicity recalls children’s drawings, Palaeolithic pictograms, or Cy Twombly’s gestural notations—but also the epistemic humility inherent in any anthropological gaze (Ingold 2007). What emerges is a visual system that does not seek representation but iteration: each figure is a variation, not a repetition.

The serial form of the series recalls historical typologies—especially the physiognomic grids of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Cesare Lombroso’s criminological atlases or colonial anthropometric surveys (Tagg 1988). But Widauer’s intervention is diametrically opposed: whereas those archives classified and disciplined, she dismantles. Her series is not a typology but an anti-typology. The differences between the figures are not categorical but gestural. They mark possibilities, not classifications.

Judith Butler’s concept of performativity offers a key theoretical lens here. Subjectivity, as Butler argues, is not the manifestation of inner essence but the effect of repeated acts, inscriptions, and citations (Butler 1993). Widauer’s figures are such acts: not representations but performative positions. The body is not a given form, but a choreographed mark. It emerges through writing—through lines that bend, fold, intersect.

This also disrupts the notion of a stable self-image. The marble busts represent ideals of continuity, rationality, and static presence. Widauer’s overlaid line bodies introduce an epistemology of instability. As Jacques Derrida writes in his critique of phonocentrism, every trace is différance—a delay, not an origin (Derrida 1967). The body in Designo ergo sum is precisely such a trace: unfinalised, variable, relational.

The relationship between head and body is renegotiated in each drawing. The bust suggests depth, history, authority. The drawn figure insists on surface, movement, and immediacy. Between these two modes lies a field of dislocation. The viewer does not encounter a unified figure but the gap between two epistemic orders. Or, as Rosi Braidotti writes: “The posthuman subject is a nomadic assemblage. It resists fixity” (Braidotti 2013, 56). Widauer’s figures are such nomadic assemblages—interstitial beings whose visual grammar claims no coherence.

The grid arrangement reinforces this conceptual logic. What appears systematic is, in fact, a visual exercise in variation. The viewer’s gaze moves from one head to the next, from one pose to another, without arriving at a totalizing image. The series resists consolidation. It insists on fragment, difference, and the singularity of each gesture. At the same time, it evokes a collective field—a visual assembly of subjectivities bound not by sameness, but by relation.

This is where the political force of the work lies. Designo ergo sum is not a portrait series—it is a radical reformulation of what it means to appear. It does not depict individuals but conditions. It does not speak about identity, but about gesture. And it refuses the idea that language—or drawing—must “represent.” Instead, drawing becomes action, a configuration of presence that begins not in the head or the image, but in the stroke that asserts a figure.

In Nives Widauer’s VoiceOver series, writing becomes not only visible but dialogic. Each drawing consists of hand-rendered aphorisms in coloured pencil, meticulously composed on black paper and accompanied by printed images of birds. These works stage language as both citation and gesture—appropriated yet embodied, philosophical yet intimate.

The phrases inscribed—“The limits of my language are the limits of my mind,” “All communication must lead to change,” “If you wish to converse with me, define your terms”—derive from thinkers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Frantz Fanon, or Hannah Arendt, while others may be Widauer’s own formulations. But authorship is not the point. These utterances function as micro-philosophies: performative propositions that foreground the conditions of communication, relation, and appearance.

Rather than typeset declarations, the phrases are drawn—letter by letter, line by line—introducing rhythm, texture, and bodily presence into the act of quotation. This material labour reinserts citation into the space of action. Language is not merely referenced—it is enacted. This aligns with the feminist legacy of appropriation art, from Sherrie Levine to Mary Kelly, where repetition does not flatten meaning, but recharges it with new agency.

Visually, the coloured outlines framing each phrase suggest a space of articulation—at once bounded and unstable. The typography is never uniform: sizes vary, spacing shifts, lines tremble. These deviations are not errors; they are inscriptions of presence. Widauer’s drawings resist the digital smoothness of contemporary textuality. They insist on the imperfect, the intimate, the situated.

This hand-drawn instability resonates with what Roland Barthes calls the grain of the voice—that material excess of meaning, the breath and friction behind articulation (Barthes 1977). In Widauer’s VoiceOver, that grain is visual: a syntax of colour, pressure, and imbalance. Language becomes palpable. It is not consumed—it is felt.

The ornithological illustrations introduce a second semiotic register. These birds—delicate, vintage, scientific—anchor the text in a history of classification and colonial taxonomy. Yet in Widauer’s work, they become metaphors for voice, miscommunication, or flight. The juxtaposition unsettles both systems. The bird is no longer a specimen; it is a signifier. It echoes the text not as illustration, but as counterpoint.

This polyphonic layering recalls Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism: the coexistence of multiple voices within a single field (Bakhtin 1981). Widauer’s surfaces are such dialogic spaces—assemblages of philosophical quotation, zoological image, hand-drawn typographic form. They do not synthesize; they resonate. Meaning is not fixed, but relational.

This relationality is epistemic. As Donna Haraway insists, all knowledge is situated, partial, and embodied (Haraway 1988). VoiceOver enacts this principle in visual form. It refuses disciplinary boundaries—between art and theory, image and language, science and poetics. Instead, it offers constellations of utterance. Each drawing is a sentence, a thought, a vibration.

In parallel, the ANNA series stages a grammar of selfhood: faces reduced to essential contours, interrupted by chromatic insertions, fragmentations, or visual dissonances. Each drawing isolates the head as a bounded field—then disrupts it through asymmetry, chromatic tension, and symbolic shorthand. Eyes, lips, hands, and hair become signs—neither expressive nor descriptive, but operative. The subject here is not portrayed, but constructed. As in Widauer’s broader practice, line becomes logic, and form becomes syntax. These drawings function less as portraits than as semiotic maps of disorientation.

The cinematic connotation of “voice-over” is also significant. In film, the voice-over is disembodied, explanatory, often authoritarian. Widauer reverses this logic: here, the voice is the image. The hand-drawn text becomes the voice. The body returns—not as actor, but as scribe. Citation becomes presence.

This inversion speaks directly to Derrida’s critique of phonocentrism, the philosophical privileging of speech over writing (Derrida 1967). Widauer’s VoiceOver series stages a counter-claim: writing is not derivative. It is originary. It is not belated speech—it is thought in form. In drawing the word, she makes thinking visible—not to stabilize it, but to open it.

In this gesture lies the political charge of the work. Widauer’s inscriptions resist the speed, automation, and abstraction of contemporary textual culture. They do not aim to persuade, impress, or inform. They ask the viewer to pause. To read slowly. To dwell in ambiguity. They shift language from function to presence.

These drawings are not messages. They are positions. They constitute what Sara Ahmed calls “affective orientations”—they organize attention, shape contact, guide perception (Ahmed 2006). They offer no final interpretation, but a space of shared attention. A space in which language is not representation, but relation.

In VoiceOver, Widauer proposes a grammar of presence: one that unfolds through visual citation, affective resonance, and epistemic dissonance. It is not a system—it is a poetics. Not a manifesto, but a method. In these works, to write is not to illustrate a thought, but to enact one. To quote is not to defer meaning, but to perform it anew.

At the conceptual core of Designo ergo sum – language as visible action lies a curatorial proposition: that writing—when materialized, drawn, mirrored, or fractured—is not illustrative, but active. It is a modality of appearance, a form of praxis in Hannah Arendt’s sense. To write, in this framework, is to act: to place oneself into the world, to stake a claim, to perform presence.

Widauer’s works do not merely comment on language; they enact it. They render inscriptions as a performative force, not a passive residue. Whether on mirror, paper, or body, writing becomes a spatial intervention. Each mark—typographic, cursive, etched—constitutes a gesture of articulation. Language is not content—it is agency.

Throughout the exhibition, this agency unfolds across mediums and scales. Aphorisms become drawings. Mirrors become syntax. Muscles become constellations. Every element functions as a sentence: a structured act of saying, of tracing, of positioning. The works do not explain—they orient. They invite attention, not interpretation. They are not representations of thought—they are thought in form.

In doing so, Widauer’s practice counters the disembodiment of contemporary textual regimes. Against the flattening of digital code and the speed of algorithmic language, her inscriptions reclaim slowness, tactility, and presence. As Brian Massumi observes, “the real is the relational field in which expression happens” (Massumi 2002, 26). Widauer navigates precisely this field—where expression is not additive, but constitutive.

Curatorially, Designo ergo sum advances the broader theoretical arc of the Beyond Existence series by inserting writing into the matrix of human appearance. If earlier chapters explored figuration, disappearance, and voice, this exhibition positions language itself as the site of action. Not merely what is said, but how it is drawn. Not what is meant, but how it is made visible.

This visibility is not transparency. Widauer’s inscriptions are fragmentary, open-ended, relational. They resist closure, even as they assert presence. Their political force lies not in declaration, but in orientation. They refuse spectacle, yet they demand attention. They offer no singular reading, but they activate a shared space of perception.

In this sense, Widauer’s works embody a quiet radicalism. They reclaim the poetic, the intimate, the embodied—not as retreat, but as strategy. Against the instrumentalisation of language, they offer friction. Against the commodification of communication, they offer resonance. They suggest that to inscribe is not to finalize—it is to begin relation.

The inclusion of ANNA II as the exhibition’s central image sharpens this strategy. A crowned head - its mouth obscured by a raised green hand - confronts the viewer through obstruction. Here, the act of hiding becomes the condition of showing. As throughout Widauer’s work, minimalism functions not as aesthetic reduction, but as political device. The fewer the lines, the more forceful the claim. ANNA does not illustrate the exhibition thesis – it performs it: language, gesture, and visual abstraction converge in the appearance of a subject that is legible only through interruption. 

And this is the exhibition’s final proposition: that language matters not because it conveys information, but because it stages encounter. Because it creates appearance. Because it performs subjectivity, relation, and world.