Outranspo’s Outransmesse: On/Off was created through a ludic, participatory process using literary, literal, homophonic and intersemiotic translation into multiple languages and forms of expression. The Outranspo, a group of multilingual translators/ scholars/ artists, who have adapted elements from the Oulipo to their own creative take on translation, refer to this process of expansion as ‘messe’, which, resonating with the English ‘mess’ and the French ‘messe’ (religious mass), evokes both chaos and order. Here instability and change appear as opportunity. Thinking about the inspiration for the messe, Outranspo co-founder Lily Robert-Foley names ‘all of the invisible choices that weren’t made, … the potentials that weren’t explored’ but that haunt any translation. In the messe all the choices are present, all the potentials are there ready to be explored.
The Outranspo usually perform their work live and audiences are encouraged to join in and become performers, just as one is invited to join in the singing or religious rituals during mass in the church. However, sometimes pieces are recorded, like On/Off, which was edited into a distinct sound work. Robert-Foley co-edited the piece with fellow Outranspian Santiago Artozqui, a process she describes as another layer of translation, this time with the aim of creating a rhythmic harmonically sound composition that would respect all the different voices.
NOTE: When you listen to the performance, feel free to join in, sing along or expand it by adding your own translations.
In this forme brève, Vidal and Campbell juxtapose previous translations with sound, recitations and multimodal re-translations of Kurt Schwitters’ poem ‘An Anna Blume’ (circa 1919). They pay homage to his typographical genius and re-imagine Schwitters’ sense of Merz, ‘gluing or nailing bits [of garbage] together’ in the digital age. Projecting the past onto the future and drawing on their own subjectivities, the translators raid historical archives and enlist Dadaist and surrealist memes in a 21st century mêlée of the poem’s many iterations.
To find our more about this work, read Campbell and Vidal's article 'On Performing Philosophy through Translation' (2023).
"We do not translate in order to return to a text, but in order to operate a proliferation of text in performance, to activate a serial metamorphosis, which allows every reader to participate in the work’s becoming, to leave their trace, their imprint, to project the ST [Source text] into its future." (Clive Scott 2010: 162)
Noèlia Díaz-Vicedo & Hari Marini, Spiralling Words: Πoesia en acció, 2022
Scott's 'proliferation of text in performance' can be seen as almost programmatic for Marini and Díaz-Vicedo's Spiralling Words: Πoesia en acció, which consisted of two processes and two outputs: a poster, which also works as a gateway to diverse creative translations and a 20' performance, which features some of these translations. For the online exhibition the performance is represented by a 6-minute video.
Note: In order to access the QR codes on the poster please click on the image to open it as a pdf.
The performance took place in Somerset House on 14th July 2022. Originally 20 minutes long and made for a live audience, it was documented with several mobile phones by audience members. The poets have edited this footage into a 6-minute video to give an idea of the core aims of the performance, i.e. ‘to use poetic translation or translation of poetry as a form of action … that goes beyond the word and beyond the sound.’ (Díaz-Vicedo) The performance built on the workshops – in fact, it integrated some of the translations made during the workshops. While it revealed translation as part of the process of creation it was itself not so much a translation of anything in particular, but rather a celebration of translation and poetic creation as interactive live event. The performance flowed between Greek, Catalan and English, without offering conventional linguistic translations between the languages, yet telling a story which could be understood by all. Gradually erasing the borders between audience and performers, Marini and Díaz-Vicedo moved from the more formal recital through dialogue and song to inviting everyone to share fruit and a glass of ouzo and to contribute to the future of the performance by writing comments, thoughts, and further translations onto the poets’ aprons. As Marini notes, ‘the people formed the process [of creation/translation] with us’ – together the poets and the audience performed the proliferation of meaning inherent to the process of translation.
To find out more about Marini and Díaz-Vicedo's collaborative work, visit PartSuspended.
Díaz-Vicedo and Marini held three workshops (two online, one hybrid with some participants online and others in situ in Corfu) which focused on the sound of language and poetry as a primarily oral event. Participants were invited to take part in a series of listening and creative writing exercises before listening to a Greek and a Spanish poem, which were then consecutively translated into sound, still or moving image, and finally words. Here, translation was employed as a thinking process, as a tool to clarify one’s own creative expression, or perhaps even one’s own understanding. At each stage participants exchanged and discussed their individual translations, so that the material they had at their disposition grew as it was interpreted differently by each individual translator and underwent the serial metamorphosis described by Scott (2010).
The poster is a concrete, material instantiation of the workshops as well as an outcome of them. Through its design it traces the consecutive process of making and gives access to the results, here also inviting the viewer to interact and so to carry on interpreting. In order to access it, viewers have to scan the QR codes with their phones. Experiencing the individual translations behind each code on the intimate screen of the phone recreates the circumstances under which most of them were made, i.e. in isolation and communicating via a screen during the online workshops. The poems which started the process of translation are deliberately not included in the poster so as to foreground the creative autonomy of these translations of the aural experience of language.
Zeina Dghaim: Symposium I, Symposium II, Symposium III, 2022
Gouache, Acrylic, and Calligraphy Ink on Canvas, triptych, 40.64cm x 50.8cm each
Opportunity and serial metamorphosis are also at the heart of Zeina Dghaim’s triptych, which is a visual translation of the talks, performances, workshops and discussions which took place during the three symposia held by the Experiential Translation Network in 2021 and 2022. Dghaim’s creative process started with collecting data including transcripts and chats of online Network meetings and postings on padlets. After ‘cleaning’ the text for input into a natural language processing software, Dghaim used the Voyant tool to analyze the data, a process in which she collaborates with the software: the Voyant tool gives a list of the top 59 words that occur in a text (other than common stop words eliminated from the analysis), which gives a suggestion of what is dominating the narrative. This arbitrary cap (reminiscent of OULIPO constraints) allows the artist to start the process of sketching, from the list of top words and their associations.
Dghaim's translation of textual data into painting ranges from a very literal approach (e.g. the frequency of the word ‘blue’ determined the overall background colour) to symbols generated from the data (e.g. ‘a soul shines like a diamond’ = a geometric-inspired shape for the soul based on the patterns and conditions of a diamond’).
After sketching the associations in particular groups of words, Dghaim chooses one that most represents it and starts painting. Here, her process involves experimentation with various perspectives and compositions while being guided by the restraints imposed by the words. At the same time she is conscious that her painting is just one of many possible interpretations, which can (and should!) be re-translated ‘over and over again’.
This rhizomatic perspective resonates with an experiential view of successive translation as ‘part of an infinite palimpsest of texts and works’.
Note: You can download the documents that informed the creative process of the Symposia triptych here.
Sophie Clausen and Manuela Perteghella, I’m Only Human, 2022
interactive installation, 18 movable aluminium panels, and sound recording
For this installation Sophie Clausen and Manuela Perteghella translated the poem 'Ideal' by Danish poet Gustav Munch-Petersen (1912-38) into an interactive collage consisting of visual (photographs, painting, collage) and linguistic (English and Italian) translations and recordings of the poem in Danish (recited by the poet’s daughter), English (recited by Clausen) and Italian (recited by Perteghella).
While each of the 18 panels contains a passage from the poem, the panels are not illustrations of these particular lines but rather ‘transformations’ of what Clausen and Perteghella identified as 'the atmosphere’ of the poem, the fragility and resilience of ‘being only human’. Both translators and the poet are prominently visible in the installation, which includes photographs of the poet as a young man, of Perteghella as a bride (removed in the virtual version to make space for you, dear viewer/participant), of Clausen as a child and of Clausen’s daughter.
Foregrounding the loss of control of the translator/artist over their work once it has left the desk/the studio, and exposing the multiplication of the work through translation, in the physical exhibition, viewers are invited to move the 18 aluminium panels around to create new (multilingual) versions of the poem.
For the online exhibition, we have created 3 pdfs which can be downloaded by clicking on the images below and used to recreate the installation at home: please print the pdfs, cut out the 18 images and make your own version of I’m Only Human. As it was important to the artists that both translation and the translators should be visible in their work, we have left space on one of the pdfs for you to insert yourself into your new version.
The artists see ‘the legacy of the project as an ever-changing work which demands the reader-viewer to become a participant in art making through translation [while] the idea of translation as an exciting form of creation has been embodied in the artwork.’
This 2-minute animated powerpoint was initially created as a teaser to advertise the interactive workshop and collaborative performance 'Another Time This Time', which took place during the physical exhibitions in Ledbury and London in 2022. 'Another Time This Time' draws on existing texts and images (curated by John London and Chris Danowski) from other times of pandemic and panic as well as original contributions from the present.
With a focus on words and how they fare in isolation, 'Another Time This Time' proposes a ludic exploration of what it means to perform experience and to experience performance.
The trailer gives an idea of the central concerns of the workshop and performance.
If you want to find out more about this work, read John London's chapter 'Experiencing performance and performing experience: Translation, fragmentation and composition on stage, in theory and in practice' (2024)