Traduttore, traditore 2015

Tim Staatliches Textil un Industriemuseum, Augsburg, Germany

The translation implies understanding a text in order to reproduce it in another language.Traduttore, traditore is a translation of Bertolt Breacht's (Augusburg  1898-1956) poem called "A worker who reads history" using a graphic equalizer. The graphic equalizer registers the audio signals while an actor reads the poem.The drawing that comes up will be stamp in a fabric, In this way it won´t be just a simple abstract drawing but each page of the book will be not written but disegned by the woven graphic translation. This is meant to be a cross-language work where the translation works as the articulation between them. While the work is being carried out, there is a combination of ancient and modern languages, traditional and digital devices.If we have ever wonder if the stories loses its essence when being translated, I think that the answer is that it becomes something different. Some things are definitively changed – the materiality of the word and its phonetic dimension – and they turn out to be something new. We will be in trouble if we want the translation to be the same as the original. We translate, precisely because we are not the same. The translation is a bridge between the linguistics and the graphism, the texile, the modern and the tradition. I mean to go beyond the building of a bridge, to weave a network and to bond concepts. To translate to understand, to get closer, to connect each other. 

When the word disappears as it has been translated into the graphic language, we start exploring the silence which is  full of meanings.