Paper Boats (2015)

In ‘Paper boats’ participants were asked to follow, as accurately as possible, a set of simple instructions for how to fold a paper boat. These instructions were translated several times (from English to Spanish, and back again) using ‘Google Translate’. As the text was translated back and forth, its original meaning gradually disintegrated with each re-translation. The original text became a multitude of broken texts: ‘When we translate a code is broken, to decipher is to dissect ... the text in the other language becomes thinner, the light seems to pass through its already loosened fibers’.