黑料不打烊

We know that language shapes thought, and therefore the way we perceive 鈥渞eality.鈥� Perhaps that鈥檚 why we鈥檝e been so concerned with concealing its meanings, with building codes that allow us to create other realities or to preserve territories that would otherwise be destroyed.

One of the methods used during the Victorian era to encrypt communication was floriography. Flowers allowed for the sending of seemingly coded messages that all speakers of that language could decipher. All the communities mentioned earlier have been forced to 鈥渟peak the language of the enemy,鈥� while constructing codes that allowed them to exist within a reality parallel to the hostile environment surrounding them. Words that enabled the formation of communities.

鈥淭he term anti-language refers to forms of language that are used by people who are somehow apart from mainstream society, either residing on the edges of it, perhaps frowned on in some way, or hidden away or even criminalized, with attempts from the mainstream to expel or contain them.鈥�

Paul BAKER, FABULOSA! The Story of Polari, Britain鈥檚 Secret Gay Language, 2019

Perhaps this connection to the language of flowers led Vita Sackville-West to create a garden of white flowers. A whole text only her initiates could read, yet one that served Derek Jarman in articulating his chapter on white in Chroma, 1993. In it, as in the rest of his artistic work, references draw from both pop culture and classical tradition, crafting a mythology that continually traced a genealogy, opening up the possibility of stories on the margins of historiography. The map as an act of love.