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The set of works presented in Traslaciones demonstrates how the artist, even without leaving his studio, works like a nomad. He delivers forms and meanings that never stop traveling, moving from one space and from one subject to another. And not only that: he also produces, with each work, a certain slippage: from the first reference, from the starting point, to the darkness of the desert. A phenomenon that undoubtedly multiplies when he works on a misplaced experience like the one he concerns us with. This is a project without a nerve center on the idea of displacement, whether literal or figurative, which could be told through this theorem: two institutions that become four, two curators and four artistic projects made by five people that, finally, become They have two different locations.
For every movement the theme is variation, the transition from the repetition of the same to its opposite pole, difference. The need to communicate, that is, to distribute information between subjects with similar interests between three languages, Spanish, French and English as a vehicle of understanding, has revealed to us the secret that the use of all language contains: «there are not two types of language, but two possible treatments of it»2. Each jump from one language to another produces the abandonment of a position that claims to be the same and, however, can no longer be. The risks of literalism are well known. Every good translation necessarily entails a different representation, a new scheme: not a simplification, as it may seem at first glance, but a new distribution of the sensible.
Dictionaries are more ambiguous than they seem. While the first meaning of the word “translation” refers, in Spanish, to the world of physics, the second directs us to linguistics. At what point did our language lose the n that accompanies the term in English and French when it refers to moving a word or phrase from one language or another? It’s a relief that borders can be so porous, that letters appear and disappear. However, the study of phonetics is not our objective. Ours is morphology, or better, topography, the study of strata, of the space that unites and at the same time separates imaginaries. We propose the testing of borders as a form of knowledge, in the ultimate utopia that involves mapping reality together with the structural relationships that it articulates: from the thesis space that Regina Dejiménez opens with her study of the modifications that it undergoes in its meaning and form. copper in its transformation from natural to culture; to the ghosts without a body but with a voice in Fran Meana’s Installation History, in which an endless number of subjects inhabit a single voice, passing through the geology of the fourth dimension that Bevis Martin and Charlie Youle have available from three-dimensional objects in his work, until finally reaching the border of sound and image from which Neal Beggs reflects on the porosity of space and time.
The Christian iconography that traveled with the Spanish to the New World unfolded, once there, into mutating images capable of representing ancient Indian divinities in a veiled way. Every sign refers to an absence: it is a kind of translation that hides while teaching: expansion and camouflage. In the sixties and seventies of the last century, the turn to the conceptual also meant a certain colonization, a slide of artistic practice towards the fields of language, philosophy or experimental cinema. Various translations towards communication, pointing to the center of the information society or even towards physical absence: towards dematerialization. In 1969 Lawrence Weiner presented a work titled A translation from one language to another. A text that the artist, on the same surface of paper, by means of a neutral typography with black strokes on a white background, translates into French: Une translation d’une langue dans une autre and which can be read, in parallel below, the legend in English. The piece, published inside a notebook, acts as a mirror. Weiner’s sentence could even be thought of as a kind of isomorphism, a concept that mathematicians use when they work with two complex structures or phrases, two meanings that “can be projected onto each other, in such a way that each part has its corresponding in the other»3.
Today, data, feelings, forms of thought, knowledge, desires, passions and ways of life travel incessantly through a virtual network at the service of global information traffic, locations and stable locations are scarce. Reality and fiction are no longer antagonistic concepts; multiple correspondences are now projected between them that draw trails in different directions: transversal movements and oscillations. The interferences of the past in the present are constant. There is, however, a remnant of memory that our time is unable to absorb, generating, in this way, a continuous eternal return, a constant summons that threatens our ability to dream of the future. Every identity is constructed through the appointment of the self with the other.
TransfersIt moves in this diasporic territory, in between, where borders, cultures, traditions, locations and times converge: “displacement as a point of confluence of economic, political, cultural and psychic processes”4. Neither beginning nor place of arrival or end, but a continuous journey: the objective is to articulate a space of meeting and negotiation for artists, institutions and spectators, an experimental tool to violate limits and mix positions. Traveling is rarely done for the mere pleasure of doing so. Travel is frequently confused with flight or exile. The Jewish people called diaspora a phenomenon marked by the mobility and fragility of the Ark and, also, by the continuous destruction and construction of a Temple that was, by definition, fragile; forced movement. Like words that are thrown and moved from one language to another, in search of their counterpart, sometimes there is no home to return to.
NOTES1. Price, Seth: Dispersion. http://www. distributedhistory.com/Dispersion2008.pdf2. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix: A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and schizophrenia. Page 104, Pre-Texts, Valencia, 2002.3. R. Hofstadter, Douglas: Godel, Escher, Bach. An eternal and graceful loop. Page 57, Tusquests Editores, Madrid, 2009.4. Brah, Avtar: Cartographies of the diaspora. Identities in question. Page 46. Traffickers of dreams, Madrid, 2010.