How does being bilingual affect your relationship with the world?

Language allows us to express our thoughts and at the same time it influences how we articulate the world around us. There are many languages in the world and they all have different ways and means of rearranging our surroundings. Thus, learning a new language also requires learning new ways of communicating and understanding the world through language.

When you talk with someone in a foreign language, or the other way around, there are moments when the sender or the receiver interprets something differently because he translates it from his mother tongue. These are exactly those moments where two linguistic systems criss cross and reveal their nuances and differences.

With the collection of different understandings and their visual reconstruction through objects and actions, I created a way to make the translation between the structure of a language and the visualization of it.

Elisabeth & Elisabetta highlights those criss-cross-moments through a synchronous visualization of two videos. A multilingual person articulates meaning differently based on the language used. Through various, almost ironic, ways, I aim to bring people out of their routine way of thinking and make them understand the different ways of looking at the world by learning new languages.