Translation as Social & Aesthetic Practice
Curriculum Description :
In a world of hardening borders and contested spaces, translation means more than just the unimpeded movement from one language or another. This Nonsite Curriculum presses at the limits of what “translation” is and can do. As artists, writers, activists and citizens, we are translating all the time: between media, archives, audiences, and communities. Smooth transmission tends to be frustrated, however, often making social antagonisms legible. How do our various projects negotiate this frustration and this legibility, while activating material in the spaces between languages and cultures: not only texts, images and artifacts, but also borders, histories, documents, and even policy? And how does the translator-citizen inhabit those spaces, readying our attention, as migrating social imaginaries lead the way toward new forms of thought and action?
“Translation as Social and Aesthetic Practice” addresses these questions and the stakes they raise through presentations, plays, readings, talks and discussions.
The curriculum is open to everyone at all levels of involvement, including the planning of future events.
Event:
Join us Thursday evening, February 28, for a trio of presentations by:
Bruce Boone: Reading and discussing his translations of Pascal Quignard.
Susan Greene: Presenting and discussing her public art projects in Occupied Palestine.
Chris Nagler: Reading and discussing his translations of Alberto Masferrer.
SF Camerawork
657 Mission Street
Thursday, Feb. 28
6-8 pm
415-512-2020
sfcamerawork.org
In the weeks immediately following this event, there will be a series of informal discussions by all three of the participants.
Bruce Boone: Thursday, March 6.
Chris Nagler: Monday, March 10.
Susan Greene: Tuesday, April 1.
For information regarding times and locations, contact rob.halpern@gmail.com.
Curriculum resources and materials will be continually updated and posted at www.nonsitecollective.org under “Curricula” (click on “Translation as Social and Aesthetic Practice”).
Bruce Boone is the author of My Walk with Bob (1978), The Truth about Ted (1979), and Century of Clouds (1980). His translations include Pacific Wall, by Jean-François Lyotard; two works by Georges Bataille, Guilty and On Nietzsche; as well as a number of works by Pascal Quignard, including Albucius, and Apronenia Avitia. He is currently at work translating Quignard’s Wandering Shadows as part of his ongoing commitment to finding an English reading audience for Quignard, whose remarkable fictions combine “faux translations,” historical texts, invented stories, philosophical meditations, and autobiographical fragments. Sample the work under "Curricula" on this site.
Susan Greene is an artist, educator and clinical psychologist. Her practice straddles a range of cultural arenas, new media, and public art, while focusing on borders, migrations, decolonization and memory. Greene is one of four Jewish American women artists who formed Break the Silence Mural Project in 1989. Break the Silence artists have returned to Occupied Palestine numerous times to facilitate community mural projects, conduct arts workshops, and create sculpture in refugee camps in Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus, Beit Hanoun and Rafah. They have presented their work to high school, university, and community audiences across the United States including at the San Francisco Art Institute, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Alternative Museum in New York. The group has also produced an award winning video. Greene has led or participated in more than 30 public art projects worldwide. Originally from NYC, she has been a resident of the Bay Area 25 years. She teaches and directs the Learning Center at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Christian Nagler is a writer and performer. Most recently he has been dancing with Anna Halprin's Sea Ranch Collective, and writing a novel about the bodily effects of U.S. public policy. He is co-coordinator, with Amanda Eicher, of the Colima Project, a community art and oral history project in Colima, El Salvador, which is the site of one of the last remaining agricultural cooperatives in that country. He is currently translating the work the early twentieth-century Salvadorean writer / philosopher / political economist Alberto Masferrer, whose writing offers a powerful lens on the history of geopolitical conflict in Central America. Chris’s project engages with issues ranging from land reform and the erasure of indigenous life in El Salvador, to the social philosophy of Vitalismo and the political uses of translation.