Texte en français is  a series of videos on Iphones that appropriate and divert the text-to-speech software of the phone to highlight the relation between the sound of a word and its spelling, it phonetic and its spelt image.

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Kosmatopoulos arbitrarily selected thirteen words and for each of them, wrote it in any possible letter combination she could imagine that would recreate its spoken sound. Some words presented belong to the realm of linguistic theories such as "mot" ("word"), "lettre" ("letter") or "son" ("sound") while others are more personal to the artist - words she loves like "barbare" ("Barbarian") or words she always had a hard time spelling correctly such as "Sisyphe" ("Sisyphus"). She used and misused all the strict rules of French spelling - adding mute letters and doubling any consonants she could - to create a multiplicity of images that would preserve the unicity of the sound and used the the text-to-speech functionality of her phone to read the text obtained.

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The videos are a screen recording of the performance of the phone repeating over and over the same correct pronunciation of the word while scrolling the myriad of visually and orthographically false manifestations of it. Unlike us, the program follows the rules of phonetics and not spelling: it does not try to visually recognize words or care if they are spelt right, but rather utters the sound of each letter that compose them to make us hear them right. Transcending the variety and apparent absurdity of the spellings, it is the sound this time that emancipates from the image.

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