TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

What can one say that one cannot write?
What is “allowed” or not – by whom?
How auto censure is performing in academia?

As Spivak notes, ”Language is not everything. It is only a vital clue to where the self loses its boundaries. The ways in which rhetoric or figuration disrupt logic themselves point at the possibility of random contingency, beside language, around language. Such a dissemination cannot be under our control. Yet in translation, where meaning hops into the spacy emptiness between two named historical languages, we get perilously close to it. By juggling the disruptive rhetoricity that breaks the surface in not necessarily connected ways, we feel the selvedges of the language-textile give way, fray into frayages or facilitations.”*

In the context of a situation of performative conversations, I am keen on emphasizing on the ways in which knowledge circulate and navigate in, between, and in between “worlds” – Arts, Sciences, and societies – that have the tendency to have reciprocal fascination and inspiration.

With Rules, ethics and expanded knowledge, I propose to write a story of re/presentation(s), reflection(s) and projection(s) in resonance to the title of the conference and in dialogue with my past and current arts-based research projects, by putting at play the notions of “conflict”, “friction”, and “fiction” in relation to (more or less poetic) “translations”. This contribution aims at underlining the narrative possibilities of orality and oral history and at animating a space for manipulation of data – be they factual or fictional – to expand possibilities and relationalities between the different languages put at play, to allow reading “in between the lines”, and to address and accept translation as well as its sisters from vulgarization to interpretation. Such proposal invites the gestures of reading, appropriating, displacing, assimilating, transforming, and circulating. Here, “Reading” is approached as a method of translation, “different languages” as a zone of movement, and “in between the lines” as a poetic space with a particular attention to the scientific, the personal, and potential positionings within the arts in relation to experiences, anecdotes, knowledge, communication, and “re/search”.

“’[I]n another language, the aesthetic information will be different’ (Bense). The transfers made must therefore be understood as creative and critical events that can create new perspectives on the source”.**

References:
* p.202, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 1993, New York and London: Routledge
** p.128, J. Olsson, “In the beginning was translation”: on Noigandres Etc., in Translability, S. Arrhenius, M. Bergh, C. Sjöholm, Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2011