Word Worlds
He collects words like other people collect shells or starfish. He hoards terms, archives word combinations, catalogues sentences, finds and invents new ones. In 1994, he founded The Word Company, and since then he has been producing words that are like pictures: he invents protonyms, neologisms without (as of yet) meaning. He coins terms like protonym. The created word receives a meaning, a sense through the habit of use. Adib Fricke creates brands, labels, logos; the establishment of The Word Company is a logical development.
The word company, as excessive as it is senseless.
Fricke’s main interest circles the word, he devotes himself to words in the multiplicity of their levels of meaning. In his recent works, he takes existent words as a point of departure.
His »test drillings« lead him to bodies of texts. Interrogatives can be philosophical ones or come from the »thinking corner.« His numerical way of proceeding develops into a search for terms that interlock and lead to a formal context, or a context of content. Fricke’s medium is language, a conglomerate of sounds and syllables that form words and sentences—important to him is not a concrete reference or an attributable quotation.
He disassembles and filters the gathered texts with small programs written by himself. This results in large quantities of text fragments that are separated from their sources. He saves fragments as material »to be worked on« in a database that operates according to his rules. If a find is attributable, it looses its value for the collection. n this way, Adib Fricke also cunningly operates against the principle of the art market that feeds on the ability to attribute. Language is decoded, sentences become words, words become syllables, syllables become sounds. A new world of language comes about.
Text: Anne Maier