The Holy Bible
Translated from the Latin Vulgate
Diligently Compared with the Hebrew, Greek, and Other Editions in
Divers Languages
THE BOOK OF GENESIS
First Published by the English College at Douay
A.D. 1609 & 1610
iDoae & iDio
ALRIGHT
ref- Published by Various Artists
A.D. 2026
ipaepue-erfa
Concept: Morice de Lisle & Marcella.B
Translation: Sufferice & Google Translate
Cover: Ana Omandichana
NNumbering: Innumerat Roselare
Diligently Eroded through Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tulu, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen, Tuvan, Twi, Udmurt, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uyghur, Uzbek, Venda, Venetian, Vietnamese, Waray, Welsh, Wolof, Xhosa, Yakut, Yiddish, Yoruba, Yucatec Maya, Zapotec & Zulu
The Bible begins with a word. Then another. Then, across centuries, those words were copied, translated, contested, and instrumentalised — accruing authority not through inherent truth, but through the institutional control of their circulation.
Genesis is the first chapter of Project 2025, a long-term artistic research project initiated by Various Artists. The project departs from the Holy Bible as published by the English College at Douai in the seventeenth century — a text approached not as religious authority, but as a cultural and political artifact that has historically been mobilised to regulate belief, behaviour, and bodies. For the artists, this engagement carries a personal dimension: biblical narratives were imposed upon them during their formative years, encoding language and morality through coercion rather than consent.
The Book of Genesis is submitted to Google Translate and passed sequentially through each of its more than two hundred available languages, with each output serving as the input for the following cycle. After every translation, the text is returned to English. What emerges is progressively altered — meaning destabilised, syntax fractured, the familiar rendered increasingly strange. Over the course of approximately two hundred and forty two cycles, a shifting, often surreal narrative takes shape, one in which theological certainty gives way to linguistic drift.
After each translation cycle, all named characters and locations are extracted, alphabetically ordered, and published alongside the new version of the text. Mistranslations introduce new proper nouns; linguistic glitches generate figures with no precedent in any canonical scripture. Some names persist across the full sequence; others disappear within a few cycles. New entities emerge from structural noise. The register expands.
Over time, this accumulating index constitutes an alternative genealogy — a parallel scripture produced not by authorial intention or doctrinal authority, but by machine logic, systemic loss, and contingency. What manifests as error functions simultaneously as evolution: characters and locations mutate under the pressure of repetition, shaped by the asymmetries between languages and the irreversible distance between source and translation.
Genesis does not produce one book, but two hundred and forty two — each a discrete version, each a document of what language does when it circulates without a guardian.
At the conclusion of this first chapter, the accumulated register of names and places will constitute an independent body of work: an archive of linguistic residue bearing witness to persistence, disappearance, and unintended creation.
The Bible began with an act of creation. Genesis begins with erosion.
Genesis is the first of four chapters: Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Apocalypse.
