Ana Torfs' Echolalia exhibition, hosted at WIELS, Brussels in 2014, offers a sophisticated exploration of language as both a communicative tool and a perpetual source of misunderstanding. Through six visual installations created over a five-year period, Torfs examines how meaning shifts as words move across contexts, languages, and media—a process that parallels the transmission and transformation of mythological narratives throughout human history.

The exhibition's title itself invokes both linguistic development and pathology—the repetitive speech of a learning child or a compulsive condition—suggesting that repetition serves simultaneously as a means of mastering language and as evidence of its limitations. This duality mirrors the way cultural myths function: through repetition they become embedded in collective consciousness, yet each retelling subtly alters their form and meaning.

Torfs' work reveals how language, like mythology, exists at the intersection of precision and ambiguity. Her installations demonstrate that translation—between languages, between word and image, between past and present—inevitably transforms meaning while attempting to preserve it. This paradox lies at the heart of mythological transmission across generations and cultures, where essential narratives persist while details evolve to remain relevant to changing contexts.

By creating an alternative narrative of Western cultural history through these installations, Torfs engages in a form of mythmaking herself—selecting, rearranging, and recontextualising cultural elements to create new meaning. Her work thus serves as both an analysis of how cultural narratives function and a demonstration of the process itself, inviting viewers to recognise their own participation in the continuous reinterpretation of shared stories that shapes our understanding of reality.