“You’re Speaking My Language” event provides an hour of emphasis in the Colby Museum of Art

For anyone learning a foreign language, finding an actual space to practice one’s speaking skills in a real-world setting can be challenging, especially for those that aren’t the most confident in their abilities to make conversation with native speakers. 

Typically, when faced with a situation where two people might not know each other all that well, especially in another language, establishing common ground could be an excellent first step. 

Designed to connect and build community among learners of and native speakers of Arabic and Spanish, the Colby College Museum of Art hosted the “You’re Speaking My Language” event on Thursday, April 14 at 4 p.m. to give students a comfortable space to practice while bonding over the different art on display. 

Lined with a lovely array of food and beverages, the art museum entrance served as a welcoming meeting place for participants of the event to start the planned activities for the evening. On a nearby tray table, the materials for three different activities were laid out with descriptions of what each entailed. 

Members of the museum staff led each of the three groups into separate exhibits to take inspiration from one of the works and create an artistic piece of one’s own. When finished, everyone had the opportunity to share their creations in the chosen language of study. 

Though some students were not thrilled with the outcome of their inspired piece, the shared process of creating in silence and then conversing about the product of each person’s work created a beautiful moment of unity among participants. There was almost a collective sigh of relief when some students expressed their inability to create art that resembled the museum painting, allowing students to connect with one another in a foreign language.  

Following the main drawing activity in “The Poetics of Atmosphere” exhibit, group leaders asked participants to choose a Spanish word inspired by one of the works on display and when they were finished, to create a poem as a group from the words.

The room filled with laughter as students scrambled to assemble the words in a logical way to create a poem and even more so when one student provided the group with a dramatic reading of the final product. 

Since all of the words that the group members came up with were nouns in reference to the atmosphere, the poem read as more of a jumbled assortment of random words, making for a humorous shift in the afternoon. 

Through the group’s great effort to try to create a collaborative poem, the activity provided event participants with a shared experience to converse about and have fun getting to know one another, which is what learning a language is all about.  

Language is the very thing that brings people together and allows us to form connections as human beings, so to take one’s foreign language studies outside the classroom can be a life-altering experience even in small ways, like in assembling a poem and laughing at how ridiculous it sounds. 

One Spanish faculty member, Professor Charlie Hankin who invited his different Spanish sections to the event, was very pleased to see such a great turnout at the event. 

“I was very pleased to see many students from my Spanish class here speaking Spanish together and meeting each other from other sections,” he said. 

For Hankin, the event did a great job of selecting different ways of using art as the basis for performing rhetorical exercises while letting students have the opportunity to speak in their chosen language of study. 

“I think it’s really interesting to move between different mediums to think about what image evokes in words or to draw a different image inspired by that image, and these are all versions of what are called ekphrasis, which I find very interesting, and then, doing it in foreign languages adds a whole other sort of element of that kind of translation,” Hankin said. 

According to a UChicago.edu definition, the word ekphrasis refers to the Greek notion of recreation, in words of a work of art. It perfectly captures the structure of the activities the students got to perform in another language as the term often describes intense and detailed verbal representations of artwork. 

Overall, the night offered a really in depth exploration of art and words by creating a community free of language barriers. 

The Colby College Museum of Art hosts “You’re Speaking My Language” sessions annually, so if you missed the event this year, it’s not too late to check it out in the future.

~ Jenna Boling `24