The project comes from my personal experience as an Italian living in London. I constantly shift between Italian and English, not just in formal settings, but in everyday life, in texts, voice notes, misunderstandings, and half-translated thoughts. This bilingual friction is part of how I experience the world. It’s messy, funny, emotional — and that’s exactly what I wanted to bring into the project.
Oi Zizzi – the project
https://sore-icy-pheasant.glitch.me
[Editor’s note: In case the website is not accessible or experiences any issues, the videos below are the same as those available on the main site. They have been uploaded here via YouTube as a backup to ensure continued access.]
By playing with voice messages and subtitles that fail, contradict, or mistranslate, my aim was to capture and show that confusion and vulnerability that often comes with living between languages. The context is domestic and familiar but it’s also a metaphor for navigating hybrid identities and miscommunication.
The final video series serves as a documentation of the development and criticality of my enquiry. Each piece captures everyday conversations with a friend, but what defines them is the way subtitles are animated, distorted, or reimagined to introduce ambiguity and interpretation. These experiments have not only allowed me to visualise my research, but also helped generate further questions. They reflect my interest in exploring a topic that is often standardised — subtitling — through the lens of graphic communication design. As both a musician and a graphic designer, making this project allowed me to have fun while working on it — to play, to question, and to connect with the things I care about most.