This installation of books and cue cards is a game. Guests are invited via the covers of the two books to do a reading out loud. One book prompts the viewer with a set of directions in English, and the other in Spanish, with the promise that if a guest chooses to read the Spanish tongue-twister, or trabalenguas, out loud, they can then tear out and keep a page from the other book. This trabalenguas is used to teach the speaker how to create the ‘trilled R’ in Spanish. The more often one repeats the trabalenguas, the stronger the trilled R will become, as your tongue slowly adjusts to the correct placement in the mouth.Yet, guests have a choice. When they open one of the books, they will find the trabalenguas in the other language, and must decide whether to read it out loud. Over time, the choices audiences make will be displayed in what pages remain of the two books, themselves sisters. Both are created from a single recycled car repair manual; a reminder that the history of language cannot be divorced from the physical material of the world, nor the mechanical ways we try to train our mouths to accommodate different linguistic paradigms.

This piece is a demonstration of the way language lives and breathes between us all, its innate performativity, the privileges that surround us and grant some of us accessibility to certain ways of speaking and understanding, and the way its repeated use or disuse shapes our histories.