The enquiry investigates how folding influences the reading of information, and more specifically, how can folding shapes the way exhibition information is read within a guidebook. The research initially focused on a single image, progressed to an exhibition guidebook, and now extends into the time-based medium of video and the printed form of this written component.
The broader context intersects graphic communication, curatorial practice, and time-based design. The exhibition without wall labels (Encounters: Giacometti × Mona Hatoum, Barbican, 2025) was the site that triggered the question, where the folded leaflet was the only guide. Reading the exhibition began with reading the fold.
This research posits that a fold functions not as a container for information, but as a staging of how information is approached, encountered, and re-read. The fold does not merely hold the reading; it facilitates the reading to happen. Display and backstage are conceptualised as two aspects of a single entity, continuously exchanging roles with each unfolding.
The methodology operates across two media simultaneously. In paper, three folding structures—linear, spatial, and explored—are used to examine how fold sequence, labelling, and repetition influence a hierarchy that is continuously rewritten by the reader. In video, screen recording reveals the editing of viewing conditions, including the cursor, playback bar, cut, and replay. These two media do not illustrations of each other. They are two operations on the same research question, performed on different surfaces, designing two different conditions of reading.
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Fold exists within paper structure, within temporal sequence, and within the form of writing.
The written component is not merely a translation of the video, but a readable format of its backstage. The text is presented in a script, including timestamps, scenes, on-screen text, background sound, and voice-over, with annotations added at the moments where references, previous findings, and editing ideas emerge. Simultaneously, it is arranged within my intuitive fold structure, using unit-based design to generate hierarchy and narrative. It can be read in three ways: as a script in the booklet, as a scanned folded version, or through the unfolding video. You are invited to walk into this cube.
It is a continuation of my practice through a new medium. The process began with an exploration of a single snippet, where viewing was conceptualised as “a delayed, physical, and organised act of unfolding.” It progressed to an experimental intervention based on the exhibition guidebook, in which display and backstage were regarded not as opposites but as complementary aspects of the same structure. The work culminates in the video essay, where the central proposition is folded into time and then unfolded again. This text cuts the work and folds it back into paper. It operates as the backstage of the video while also functioning as an independent display, with its own backstage: the camera, the studio, and the act of writing itself. The layout follows the structure of a script, using time to anchor the sequence and the scene-based annotations. The viewer can read it chronologically, or explore new combinations within the text by flipping back and forth, as if dragging through a video timeline, in order to generate alternative narratives. It is once again a material presentation of a viewing system.
The shift lies in the fact that designing the reading conditions is not a single act, but a recursive one. Each medium that carries the same question generates its own conditions of readability, and then be folded by the next medium. Folding is not something the project does to material, folding is design itself.
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