Cleya Shi

Acrylic Installation - Lost and Found Between One Word and the Next

This acrylic installation is one of the primary deliverables of Lost and Found Between One Word and the Next, a BA thesis project exploring translanguaging as a decolonizing linguistic practice.The installation comprises 110 colour-printed acrylic panels hanging from a customized frame, creating an experiential space where three languages — Chinese, English, and French — coexist simultaneously without hierarchy or resolution. Each panel carries text drawn from the lived experience of multilingual life: body-part vocabulary decomposed across three scripts, city map silhouettes filled with official language legislation, code-switched sentences that no single grammar can account for, and so on. Layered together, the panels produce a visual field where no language sits in front or behind, no reading order is correct, and no single meaning resolves. The choice of these three languages is deeply personal, rooted in my own cultural and linguistic history across Beijing, Québec, and Ontario. The installation attempts to visualize what it feels like to process language not in sequence, but all at once: the simultaneous presence, interference, and coexistence of multiple linguistic systems in a single mind.

“Making translanguaging visible as embodied design practice.”