Hundred Muscle Army

A Solo Exhibition by Effi & Amir

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. [Judges 12: 5–6]

Loose lips sink ships. So do the palate and the tongue. The way we move the different parts that make up our mouth, the way the air passes through the throat, the way we pronounce certain letters and words and put together sentences, the way we activate the hundred muscles required to produce a sound—is essential to our identity. But more than that, it is fundamental to the way in which others understand, hear, and judge us.

In biblical times, it was the word shibboleth (swirl), whose pronunciation sealed fates. The Ephraimites, who tried to escape back to their land during a war, pronounced this word with an S sound rather than SH. The Gileadites, who needed a ruse to identify them, ordered everyone who took the passages of Jordan to say the word shibboleth aloud. The men of Ephraim, who pronounced this word as sibboleth, were thus identified, captured, and thrown into the stormy waters.

In the 13th century, during the Sicilian revolution on the outskirts of Palermo, the local word for chickpeas – ciceri – was used as a test to identify the French conqueror who was hiding in the city. In World War II, the Dutch underground used the district name “Scheveningen” to identify German spies, and the way the letter H is pronounced was used during the Irish Civil War to distinguish between Protestants and Catholics. Now, Ukrainian soldiers use the word palyanitsya, the name of a traditional Ukrainian bread, to identify Russian soldiers posing as Ukrainians...

Artists

Effi and Amir
Curator

Vardit Gross
כתובת

Ha’Amal 8, Tel Aviv
Dates

8.12.22-4.2.23
From the catalog

Hundred Muscle Army catalog

Back to exhibitions

Works

Installation view

Photography: Tal Nisim

50 ml Cement Casting

50 ml is the amount of air needed to pronounce one syllable.

* In an essay written in November 2020, scholars Low, Weissman, and Iwashyna responded to the argument that the fact that George Floyd said the words “I can’t breathe” proves that he could breathe. Every breath requires between 400 and 600 ml of air, but the inhaled air fills the upper airway, trachea, and bronchi first, where speech is generated. A three-syllable sentence, which requires 150 ml of air, can be uttered without any air entering the lungs themselves, the place where breathing happens.

Photography: Tal Nisim

Installation view

Photography: Tal Nisim

Mouth Puppet

A means of visual illustration, used by speech therapists to explain what is happening inside our mouths.

Photography: Tal Nisim

Hazelnuts, Tomato, Bread, Chickpeas

Hazelnuts:

Punduk / Funduk—a shibboleth word used to distinguish between Azeris and Armenians (Sumgait, Azerbaijan, 1988).

Bunduqiyya—rifle in Arabic, named so after the bullets, which are round like hazelnuts.

Tomato, Bread, Chickpeas:

Shibboleth words derived from foods leave the mouth at the center of the action:

Bandora – tomato (The civil war in Lebanon, Beirut, 1976–1990)

Ciceri – chickpeas (Sicily, 1282)

Palyanitsya – local rustic bread (Ukraine, 2022)

Photography: Tal Nisim

Pebbles, Cork

Aids used to improve articulation.

Greek orator Demosthenes spoke with pebbles in his mouth to overcome his stutter.

Speaking while clamping a cork between the front teeth requires more accurate tongue movements and helps in separating the actions of the various organs of speech.

Photography: Tal Nisim

Genealogy of the Eighth Letter

Description of the graphic evolution of the eighth letter in the alphabet.

Photography: Tal Nisim

Automatic Dialect Detection

A page from a guidebook for employees of the German immigration office who handle asylum applications, describing the use of this tool for automatic dialect detection.

* Manual of the BAMF – Bundesamtes für Migration und Flüchtlinge, 2017, p. 36.

Photography: Tal Nisim

Homemade Rainbow

The Rainbow Passage—a short paragraph describing the rainbow phenomenon—is used to analyze accents and pronunciation, since it contains all the existing phonemes in English.

Photography: Tal Nisim

Parsley

A shibboleth word used to identify Haitian immigrants who were persecuted by the dictatorial regime in the Dominican Republic in 1931. Creole-speaking Haitians cannot pronounce the rolling r sound in the Spanish word perejil (parsley).

Photography: Tal Nisim

EPG Palate

A portable electropalatography (EPG) system that monitors tongue contact with the hard palate during speech using 62 electrodes embedded in its lingual surface. Every time the tongue touches one of the electrodes, a signal is sent, which is registered on a virtual palate.

* The EPG palette is produced by Rose Medical Solutions Ltd., based on a mold by Dr. Max Sackstein, and with the kind support of Prof. Johan Verhoeven, University of Antwerp

Photography: Tal Nisim

Candle

A means of teaching the pronunciation of the sounds for P and B. The candle must be held close to the lips. Pronouncing the B sound correctly will not affect the flame, while pronouncing the P sound will extinguish it.

Photography: Tal Nisim

Interior of the Vocal Tract

A life-sized 3D model of the interior of the vocal tract.

* A 3D Vocal tract model designed by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Peter Birkholz, Institute of Acoustics and Speech Communication, Technische Universität Dresden; 3D Printing: 3D Factory

Photography: Tal Nisim

I E A O U

Physical models representing the shape of the vocal tract when pronouncing the five basic vowel sounds. The cylindrical tube represents the vocal cavity when aligned, from the glottis (the narrow end) to the lips (the wide end).

* Based on models by Dr. Takayuki Arai; Lathe: Nir Shary

Photography: Tal Nisim