Glossary: TRANSLATION. By Carla Zaccagnini *

Nofuinidieike (one who eats stone)

To translate is also to make mistakes, to fall into and construct wrong meanings. It is to speak of oneself with a foreign, predefined word organization. It is to find the spaces (margins, cracks) in a certain (con)text that can be used to project content, slightly shifting a meaning to appropriate what we might have said and adjust it to our own way of speaking. It requires some delicacy, in order that the original text still be readable, and that the mistakes can be complained about without the trickery being noticed. Like a bad actor, or one too good, who gets the pronunciation or intonation wrong in a sentence and in doing so changes the interpretation of an entire classic.

This idea of translation as a strategy for writing with given (or lent) words structures the construction of this acceptation of the term in the Glossary. The text is to be written by bringing two foreign discourses – attempts at translation in themselves – together. Translation, in both cases, as a movement which transfers meaning, not from one language to another, but from one type of matter to another, from the sculpture to the verb. On one hand, the attempt to build a verbal and tactile bridge towards Oteiza’s Homenaje a Velázquez sculpture; on the other, Oteiza’s attempt to sketch an aesthetic reading of Pre-Hispanic megalithic sculptures.

Carla Zaccagnini (Buenos Aires, 1973) is an artist, writer, and curator, who lives in São Paulo. Strategies for creating meaning through forms of displacement, deviation, approximation and reorganization are often found in her works. Among her most recent exhibitions are her participation in the 28 Bienal de São Paulo (2008) and the solo shows Bifurcações e encruzilhadas (Vermelho, São Paulo, 2008), no.it is opposition. (AGYU, Toronto, 2008), Imposible pero necesario (Joan Prats, Barcelona, 2010) and Plano de falla (Ignacio Liprandi, Buenos Aires, 2011).

*This presentation is linked to the Glossary, and also to Una, dos, tres, cuatro paredes (“One, two, three, four walls”), Bulegoa z/b’s contribution to Estancias. Prácticas restituyentes sobre la Colección ARTIUM (“STANZAS. Restitutive Practices on the Artium Collection”) (www.artium.org).