One-day research seminar on theoretical issues related to translation with Emily Apter and Simon Leung
Mackey apartments, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles
March 28, 2018
Emily Apter proposed a reflection on the work The House of Dust through the prism of her theoretical approach to translation and examined the differences between translation and "remediation" processes. Her presentation discussed textual materiality and the question of resistance to translation. How the confrontation with untranslatability implies an experience not of renunciation or resolution but of attention to what is politically at work in the question of cultural and linguistic difference. The participants prepared the session by reading two texts Untranslatable the reading versus the looking and Reading the textual object.
Simon Leung presented the different phases of his Squatting project - involving a relationship between body, language, architecture and urban planning - which allows us to reflect on the cultural and political dimensions of linguistic and colonial differences in China (where many linguistic tensions exist between English, Mandarin and Cantonese in their various oral and written forms). His work examines this postcolonial complexity in the fields of globalized contemporary art and neo-liberal capitalism.