Dejak Codex - Perastar

About This Exhibit

The Dejak Codex is a three-volume work originally created as a project for an undergraduate linguistics program. At its heart is a collection of stories that were told to me throughout my childhood by various relatives, including my great-grandmother, Julia Nydeggar. I later reconstructed these stories in Idrani, treating the project as both an exploration of language and an act of preservation—transforming stories passed down through memory and family into a written literary tradition.

The three volumes present the same body of material in three different forms. The first contains the Idrani texts written in Khisipokhi script; the second contains a Latinized transliteration of the Idrani; and the third provides an English translation. The Codices are deliberately designed as physical artifacts rather than conventional printed books. Their pages are printed in red and black on white paper and bound in covers constructed from recycled cardboard and discarded construction paper, thickly coated with leftover latex paint, with ornamental details executed in gold leaf.

The storage case is constructed from scrap oak and finished with gold leaf. The books themselves also depart from the conventions of English-language bookmaking: they open from left to right, rather than from right to left as is conventional with English books. Together, the three volumes are intended not simply as a record of stories, but as an artifact of an imagined literary tradition—bringing language, family memory, typography, translation, and handmade bookmaking into a single work.