Fold, Hexagonal

Fold, Hexagonal presents the impossibility of entering into the language of others and suggests the ways in which such an exclusion can open up a space of imagination around words. This space of imagination includes the visual and bodily experiences of language as well as the physical space that writing occupies. The “Hexagonal” of the title alludes to the infinite hexagonal rooms featured in Jorge Luis Borges's short story “The Library of Babel” and also evokes an open-ended linguistic space. The project features hexagonal forms staged on folded, lined paper, reflected and fragmented by multiple mirrors that alter their directions and dimensions and suggest the ruin of Borges's library. Sentences describing the folding, reflecting, and refracting of lines, diagonals, squares, rectangles and hexagons are written with English letters forced into squares designed for Korean syllabic blocks. These form grammatically correct but scarcely legible forms whose process of inscription slows the apprehension of their meaning. What Walter Benjamin calls “pure language” is imagined here through a process of translation that is always a becoming, a translation that follows the unending continuation of a fold.