![]() ![]() Although the responses have not been translated yet (more funding is needed to continue the project), in the context of an interview I conducted with Sinvergüenza, she told me many of the hutong residents responded with accounts their own woes, asking not only where Nicaragua was but how can they help if they themselves are powerless. Hutong residents were chosen because they also face the threat of dispossession without remuneration due to Beijing’s beautification process, which seeks to get rid of “uncontrolled development and low-end entrepreneurship” to create a “city of the future.” Each letter had a QR code, which the hutong residents could scan through WeChat (ubiquitous social media app in China) in order to reply. The artists translated the letters into Chinese, made them publicly available online and created an installation on an exhibition space in a hutong in Beijing, hand-delivering some of the letters to the hutong residents during the final performance. They use the letters to ask “Chinese people” for support. They also describe their willingness to die fighting for their land and their way of life. ![]() In the letters, people describe how police, the military, and Chinese businessmen engaged in various forms of intimidation to kick them out of their land. In 2016, the Nicaraguan duo collected letters from rural indigenous communities near Managua who were facing the threat of eviction from their lands with no due remuneration because the Ortega government signed a contract with infrastructure development firm HKND, run by Beijing telecommunications billionaire Wang Jing, giving it a 50-year concession to build and operate an interoceanic canal, a Nicaraguan national aspiration since the 19th century. ![]() What are some other creative projects that rely on translation to put forth political evidence from which alternative claims for justice can be imagined? We can start by looking at Elyla Sinvergüenza and Guillermo Saenz’s project Cartas Mojadas / Wet Letters, where translation as structure of possibility for the art piece allows for a relationship across difference to be established. By translating them, I’m attempting to make “a preferential marking holds the potential of turning a symbol into an event, or an event into a symbol, back and forth.” Such marking turns the desires of the home-yet-to-come into “political evidence” that can be used to redefine claims for universal justice. The home-yet-to-come emerges as a result of my precarious wager to translate 10 stories collected by artist Paul Ramirez Jonas. The wager releases the multiplicity of the text and opens it up to an uncertain future, more often than not to an uncertain political future.” Translation allows the selected text to move in a different discursive realm, opening it up to uncertain political futures–uncertain because the translation does not guarantee changes in the material and social conditions. Translation can be seen as “a precarious wager that enables the discursive mobility of a text or a symbol, for better or for worse. Lydia Liu argues for an eventfulness to the act of translation that allows us to interpret the work of translation beyond the simplified understanding of rendering equivalent a message from one “community” to another. This essay is an excerpt adapted from a larger online project, Translation Aesthetics: Making Legible the Home-yet-to-come as an Instance of the Event Before the Multiplication of Labor, which can be found at: Īllow me to posit the idea of a translation aesthetics, which can be used to talk about ways in which semiotic objects use translation as their structure of possibility to bring about alternative political concerns for the sake of redefining matters of universal justice. What follows are case studies put together to argue for a translation aesthetics that can be used to make legible the event before the multiplication of labor. ![]()
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