Have you ever considered the meaning of words in your mother tongue? Whether the words we use are a true expression of what they represent? This very vernacular dilemma arose whilst I was in Salzburg, and it’s kept coming back to me, so I had to write about it.

I saw this gold plaque at the Festung Hohensalzburg, three languages printed in a modernist typeface in German, English and Italian. Despite speaking German since I was ten, I’ve never until now come across the word for monument; ‘denkmal’.

A direct translation of denkmal into English is ‘time of thought’. The word itself is literally telling you how to interact with what you see before you. It is explaining to its viewer that this is an artefact a piece of artwork to allow yourself to think, to reflect, to try and find a commonality in its display. I wondered if (because of this direct translation), that what is deemed to be a denkmal , is greatly considered before hand: whether the powers that be gave great thought was given before a work was granted denkmal status.

It spurred me to think about how much we observe art through our native language, our mother tongue. And how that frames our thought processes when absorbing art. There is no inherent instruction in the English word, monument;  it is a noun in its purest of forms. It’s merely a word, a name for an object. I think we could embrace a little more denkmal into the culture of those of English as their first language. We so often see, but how often do we observe and think?