Many are the affirmations about the impossibilities of translation; its limits; its inability of accurately transferring the meaning of a sign from one language to another.

 According to Jackobson, when translating from one language to another, the messages in one of the languages get substituted not by separate code units but by complete messages from the other language. Such a translation is a type of indirect discourse: the translator recodes and transmits a message received from another source. Therefore, a translation involves two equivalent messages in two different codes. The equivalency in the difference is the main problem of language and the main concern of Linguistics[1]; it is also the focused attention in Translations | Traduções.

We see the process of transposing the works from their specific contexts to another as a process of translation. Here, the specific context relates not only to the social, political and cultural spheres that frame the place where the artists formulated their projects, but also to the site-specific aspect of each of these projects. Raquel Garbelotti breaks down the mechanism of what could be an anthropological research about the Pomerans in the Espírito Santo region; Alice Micelli intends to give visibility to the invisible radioactivity of Chernobyl‘s exclusion zone; Giselle Beiguelman and Vera Bighetti challenge our immediate understanding of the possibilities of the virtual space defined by the limitations of the physical space.

What is enunciated in the case of transposing/translating the works to the specificities of another context (Toronto) is an irregular topography of concepts, intentions and approaches to the artistic processes involved here. These resist to a translation based on adjectives (such as Brazilian, women artists’ works) to one of substantives, the noun; that which is substantial to the intellectual proposals in each art work.

In other words, we understand that the risk of flattening this irregular topography would be a technocratic and careless gesture in face of the possibility of gaining understanding about the creative force that emerges from the space between a system of signification and another.

In the act of translating, there are no easy routes of direct equivalents since each language has its own system of signifying. The project of translation – here understood to be a conceptual support for the presentation of the works in this spatial and linguistic transit as well as the ‘translation’ of the initial concept into the (im)material quality of the artists’ works- presents itself  as a “cluster between two different presents and as such, deviating and decentralizing” [2].

And how could they not be deviating if we are dealing with an anthropologically imagined/fictionalized topography (Garbelotti), an invisible topography (Micelli) and an improbable topography (Beiguelman & Bighetti)? Translations | Traduções is a transaction that happens between places; an itinerary that seeks to evidence textual and institutional affiliations, as well as connections of the bodies that move between them - above all that of the artist. It is an informational site[3], a place of superimposed texts, photos, videos, physical spaces and things.

From the supposed immensurability of the systems, the act of translating appears as locus to investigate the intercultural contact through intrusions, fusions and disjunctions. Translation is a privileged site from which to investigate the relations between power and alterity.

We attempted not to risk diverting too much from the semantics of the term, choosing rather to widen the complexities of its definition so as to use translation as possibilities, as a forethought ability to transit within the equivalences of one (linguistic/observational) system to another as we experience the art works present in this exhibition.

[1] Roman Jackbson, Lingüística e Comunicação. (São Paulo: Editora Cultrix), page 65

[2] Jorge Menna Barreto. Lugares Moles. Master Degree dissertation presented to ECA – USP in 2007

[3] See James Mayer, “The functional site” in Documents Magazine, EUA, 1996, pág. 20-29. Apud Jorge Menna Barreto, op. cit.  page 12