Background
In March 2021 we, Ricarda Vidal and Madeleine Campbell, launched the Experiential Translation Network which brought together participants from a variety of countries and disciplines, including artists working across diverse genres (print-making, performance, painting, video, installation), translators, translation scholars and activists, pedagogues and poets, who worked in collaboration with each other and, in several cases, also with communities in Poland, the UK, Hungary, France, Spain and Italy. Over a period of 18 months, exploring the concept of ‘experiential translation’, we jointly examined the use of linguistic and multimodal translation as a way to investigate our place in the world and how we relate to our environs.
In the course of our collaboration a series of new artworks was created, which were brought together in a travelling exhibition shown in the UK, at the Heritage Centre Ledbury (7-10th July 2022), at the Inigo Rooms, Somerset House (13-15th July 2022), in Poland, at the House of Literature Łódź (18-23 April 2023) and in Italy, at CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo Venice (27th March - 7th April 2025).
This exposition presents artefacts from the travelling exhibition in the context of the theoretical framework elaborated in our edited books on Experiential Translation (2019, 2024, 2025 - see bibliography), together with insights from interviews with the artistranslators behind the artworks.
Our title ‘How eyes can hear and ears can see’
points to the affective, embodied and sensorial aspects of communication at the heart of experiential translation, an epistemic act, which is concerned with how we make sense of the world around us and how this could be translated across diverse forms of expression. Combining methods drawn from art practice and translation practice, we understand experiential translation as a form of performative inquiry into multimodal meaning-making, that is socially situated and engaged, at once dependent on and conducive to spatio-temporal participation and co-creation. Further, we take materiality and form to be fundamental elements of meaning-making, whereby material form impacts aesthetic form and both affect translatability.
Many of the works in this exhibition fall within the category of experiential translation as an epistemic process in which
translation manifests as an act of discovery, as a pathway to the acquisition, dissemination and, importantly, the production of knowledge. The function of translation is here no longer perceived as conveying meaning but rather as a form of investigation or research and of embracing the unknown, with the potential to open up the space between words and indeed to access that which escapes language. (Campbell and Vidal, 2024: 10-11)
A Rhizomatic Structure
[T]he rhizome corresponds to a map that must be generated, constructed, ever ready to be taken apart, joined up, flipped over, rearranged, with multiple entry points and multiple exits, with its own lines of flight. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 32, our translation)
The rhizome knows no origin and no end and no hierarchy. As such it is central to our understanding of translation. Unlike traditional views of translation, which treat the source text as primary and hence superior to the target text, which comes after, a rhizomatic view of translation challenges notions of authorship and authority and makes way for a non-hierarchical intertextuality. Source and target texts here exist alongside each other as part of an infinite palimpsest of texts and works, which are connected with each other, resonating, echoing, shaping one another. Like the rhizome, translation is never definite and never complete – its nodes take root at disparate moments when and where the environment is propitious.
The metaphor of the rhizome also works well to describe the transdisciplinary approach adopted by the Experiential Translation Network. There were numerous spatio-temporal nodes where our disciplines met and converged, where it became difficult to decide when translation theory became art practice or where art theory turned into translation practice, where poetry leaked into pedagogy or critical writing melted into dance. As Vidal Claramonte writes ‘transdisciplinary research cannot follow linear paths that conceive of structures as trees, but must rather walk along rhizomatic paths.’ (2022:18) This was reflected in our working method as a Network, where participants combined individual practice with collaboration, sometimes with one or two others, sometimes with larger groups of people via a public workshop, and we regularly met as a group to exchange ideas, discuss progress and shape and reshape our work. In spring 2023 we conducted conversations with the artists who made work for the exhibition to discuss the role of translation in their art practice, and to elaborate on the experiential dimension of their process. Quotes from these conversations appear in cursive font in the exposition.
In an attempt to recreate the transdisciplinarity of our collaboration, our exposition is presented as a rhizome of interconnected elements inviting readers/viewers to pick their own path(s).
