I spent years with an English dictionary by my side to learn the language. Unlike with my mother tongue, I could somewhat remember impressions of when foreign phrases turn legible, when my hand and mouth settle into new shapes. For all i know, i promise, I revisit the dictionary as an instrument that enables my body to reincorporate itself. Gaining another tongue entails countless small, intimate rituals of the body turning itself inside out to the unfamiliar - flipping through pages, mouthing new syllables, writing lines over and over. As I hide the reference book or listen to a foreigner, I see the strange and unknown fade into what I can understand and use, into me.
This dictionary represents the body of knowledge as made up of these metabolic instances that take absence and difference inside and turn them into muscle memory. Lipstick marks both the mouth and the hand of language, both the cosmetic touch and the blood it mimics, both the lips kissing and consuming. I use it to cross out the words that I know but leave the definitions, exposing what I know. This project recounts how my self becomes through not a collection of revelations, but gathering opacities and exposures that elude definition.