Decoding the Switch

Slought is pleased to announce "Decoding the Switch," a series of events, conversations, and exhibitions exploring practices of code-switching and the ethics of borrowing, performing and appropriating the cultural codes of others.

To switch codes, originally, meant to shift from one language system or dialect to another, sometimes even in the same conversation. Now the term is used to describe everything from transethnicity to radicalization, encompassing strategic and tacit performances and transgressions of race, sexuality, and identity alongside the rules governing professional and social behavior. As we begin this project, we ask: does the widespread use of this term evacuate the politics from these different contexts, framing all shifting of codes to be the same?

Our project thus seeks to interrogate both practices of code-switching and the use of the term itself. Through a series of public programs we will focus on particular examples of code-switching as a way to conceptualize and situate the performance of identity. Even as we turn to specific practices, we ask broader questions about the nature of code-switching and the ways in which it can reinforce and/or destabilize power-dynamics and social hierarchy. Code-switching can be at once escape and survival, strategic and performative, necessary and elective, deliberate and accidental.

Code-switching may also be invisible. To decode the code, one may need to know the code. Which causes us to wonder, as part of our own reflexive practice as organizers: can code always be revealed? Should all codes be decoded and crossed? Ought some codes to remain secret? With these questions in mind, we will consider the ethics and politics of coded and decoded behavior and raise questions concerning the borrowing, performing and appropriating of cultural codes at a moment when more and more of these practices are being interrogated and exposed.