Notions of “home” in Europe are becoming more fluid, being challenged and reshaped by unprecedented migration. Our collaborative project Talking Transformations: Home on the Move explored the impact of migration on these notions by employing creative writing, creative translation, intersemiotic translation into film-art and public workshops.
In the course of the project, poetry about aspects of “home” was sent into a linguistic and artistic “migration,” which involved translation into different languages and into film art. Translated poetry and artworks, as well as vocal recordings of the poems, travelled to and from the EU countries that feature most in migration into and out of the UK—for migration to the UK, Romania and Poland; for migration from the UK, France and Spain. The works were exhibited in the UK (Whitstable Biennale, Ledbury Poetry Festival, the National Poetry Library, Southbank Centre London, Tate Exchange London) and abroad (Den Haag, Hong Kong) in 2018 and 2019, where they were also translated into new languages and art forms during workshops in libraries, schools and exhibition spaces.
The use of “translation” as the underpinning framework for our project stems from its critical relevance to “motion”: as practice, translation signifies the process whereby texts move across borders between cultural, geographical and temporal spaces.
In this online exhibition we present the poems and the transformations they have undergone on their journeys through different languages and artforms.
Please scroll through, click the speaker symbols to listen to the poems and translators reciting their work and watch the 7 art films.
We hope you'll feel inspired and might even want to make your own translations.
To read more about the theoretical underpinnings of the project, please read our article "Translation as Movement: Migration and Notions of 'Home'" in Open Cultural Studies, in which we discuss the changing notions of home within the framework of the project and present how the discursive and public-facing nature of Talking Transformations can contribute to a more positive and inclusive. debate of migration and its impact on identity and culture.
See below for our poetry anthology Home on the Move: Two Poems Go on a Journey.