Railing Codex

Jie Shao, Parsons School of Design '20

Railing Codex is an installation, a community printshop, and a collective dictionary created by Pararailing (Jie Shao, Sixing Xu and Xuecan Ye), their friends, and friends of their friends. Launched in 2022 in response to the slippage of meaning that marks our post-pandemic world, Railing Codex invites cultural workers - artists, writers, poets, scholars, curators and other arts workers - to contribute their own dictionary definitions of words.

The project has now materialized into an artist’s book in the form of a “slanted dictionary” made up of the first eight volumes of Railing Codex. Each contributor to a volume selected a word from a list and interpreted it in their chosen genre and language. They then selected a word from their entry and nominated a writer to participate in the next volume. The nominated writer chose from the newly generated list of words to carry the process forward.

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