Translucent is a book-object I made, with old photolithography films from my former t-shirt brand Tozco. Laying at the corner of a shelf gathering dust, there was this huge roll of films, accumulated for several years. Not wanting to throw them away and knowing that a roll in a corner had no use at all, I decided to cut them into 12×24 centimeter pieces, fold them and bind them into a book, which I called Translucent. To give depth to the pages and to prevent the book from being a mess of piled transparent film, I inserted some sheets of tracing paper here and there, between the film sheets.
The open pages of the book shows some layers of film with its tone degraded in shades of gray, by the tracing paper. The overlapping sections of film generate incredible graphic results from the random combination of images.
For the cover, I bought a thick textured plastic, commonly used in shower doors and carved from behind the word “Translúcido” - Translucent as translated from Portuguese -, “trans-” in front and “lúcido” in the back, using a rotary tool. Depending on the lighting and the angle you see the cover from, the text appears or fades with more or less intensity.
For each section of the book, I have gathered six spreads, two or three of which would be sheets of tracing paper, totaling 24 pages per section. I selected the 23 most interesting film sheets, to be used as the center spread for each section of the book and randomly divided the other sheets.
Binding the book proved to be a challenging task, as the film sheets are very thick and do not fold very well. On my first attempt, the end result was awful. I had to undo the sewing, let the sections rest under pressure for a few days and then bind the book again, this time with success.
