DIZIONARIO BIFRONTE
Dizionario Bifronte gathers a series of Italian bifrontal words in a small dictionary. Bifrontal are those words which have one meaning if read from left to right, but that acquire a different one if read from right to left. This concept immediately fascinated me and became the starting point for experimentation. The book, besides its function as a dictionary, wants to interact with the user and together explore the definitions of meaning, variation, orientation, direction and movement.
The original concept comes from a workshop with Silvana Amato @ IUAV University of Venice in 2016.
Meaning and variation are highlighted by the juxtaposition of the same letters following an opposite direction. They are coexisting in same, but different words: letters are in the same position, but the meaning changes. In the two twin book other graphical elements are mirrored and placed in the same area of the page, with the same function, but they are not identical. The idea of variation applied to the book provides an artwork that looks just mirrored (like reflecting a bifrontal word), but that is in fact diverse in every element (like the meaning of a reflected bifrontal word).
Orientation, direction and movement are not fixed, but they may vary according to how it is handled. The coexistence of two books provides no single cover and back as well as no starting and ending point. Alphabetical and non-alphabetical order are treated equally, taking distance from a regular dictionary, as the relevance of both the meanings inherent the words is equally important. The user can chose where it wants to start, the orientation of the book and the direction to follow. These elements want represent the bifrontal word: the direction with which you read it doesn’t affect its structure and its significance.
