One thousand and one Water Droplets

written by Uta Guan Hyë

The ancient Egyptians believed in the existence of a sacred water cycle of speech: words could metamorphose into water droplets as they passed through the ear, warming within the body before becoming gas expelled through the mouth. A conversation between two people thus took the form of liquid words, dispersing into the air, carried by clouds, and precipitated with the rain. If the listener was not attentive, the message was forever excluded and eventually evaporated. "One thousand and One Water Droplets" records the deferred exchanges between two young girls, beginning on the island of Nosy Be in Madagascar. They used an ancient encrypted Chinese writing system called "Nüshu" (literally meaning "women's writing" in Chinese) as a code or secret in their conversations. This "code" refers more to the unknown than deliberately withheld information. "Nüshu" was not regulated by linguistic rules but was based on the local dialect's writing, preserving information permanently. These messages contained deferred, ambiguous, and displaced information, offering infinite pleasure in the rotation, permutation, and combination of words. Thus, this text becomes an underwater symphony of interconnections and ruptures, where words vanish and give birth to a liquid and eternal universe before your eyes.

Dimensions: 14x20 cm, 22 pp.The cover is crafted from 270g Grain Nuage color paper, while the inner pages are made from a 100g Ingres Pastel pink paper.All binding is handmade