By Carla Machiavello, Curator

Acts of Translation is an exhibition of the works made by Chilean artists that reflect on the problems of ‘translation’ in our contemporary, globalized world. The exhibition takes as its starting point the plurality of meanings of the English word ‘translation’ in order to start a process of physical and symbolical movement of a group of art works produced in Chile by Francisca Aninat, Carmen Ariztía, Felipe Baeza, Joaquín Cociña, Paula Dittborn, and Francisco Schwember which deal with migrations of images, mediums, languages, and forms from different places and cultures.

If translation is to be taken not only in its linguistic sense, as a transcription or transaction made between two languages or texts, but in an expanded manner more closely related to its etymological meaning, ‘to carry over or across,’ it can be understood as a movement between places and a transfer from one condition, language, or form into a different one. Originally, translation was used in Theology to refer to the direct passage of the subject into heaven without suffering the intermediate state of death, while in Ecclesiastical language it was used to signal the transfer of a saint’s dead body to another grave. Intimately connected to the displacement of bodies, the notion of translation relates two complementary actions: movement and transformation, thus pointing to a state of passage and the radical movement of ‘otherness,’ the displacement of what is perceived as different from the self.

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This displacement involves both a loss and an assertion of meaning. On one hand, to translate is to take away from the roots, to remove an object or idea from its context of origin, altering its significance. As such translation generates a loss and an estrangement from an initial meaning: it is a failed encounter between languages and cultures that does not offer exact equivalences among them. Yet even though something remains inassimilable and incommunicable, being irrevocably amiss, it is this very interstice that can open a space for communication between cultures and act as an assertion of that which is particular to each and cannot be translated. This in turn points to the co-existence of a diversity of meanings in a landscape defined by migrations and commonly shared bits and pieces of information; a world that seems to be more and more transversally connected.

On the other hand, while translation reflects a desire of understanding and bridging cultural differences, it also mirrors a demand to unify what lies outside of a dominant culture’s representations of selfhood. As translation mediates between cultures it standardizes and homogenizes ‘foreignness,’ becoming a means of easier digestion of the different. The predominance of metropolitan languages still dictate what will be translated and how; translation in this sense is usually conceived as the movement from the periphery to the center of a certain object that needs the access to Western platforms of exhibition and legitimacy. Either subsuming difference into artistic canons or assimilating it to dominant historical languages through a process of analogy, artistic production from so-called Third World countries have suffered from a syndrome of inferiority, dependency, and resemblance, often perpetuated by its own members and some of the global advocates of multiculturalism. This past has led to a different internal movement that displays the radical particularities of its cultural manifestations, making up another form of purity extent from any kind of external influences.

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Since these mediations inform our everyday life, enabling and intimately influencing the processes of cultural migrations, they will not be denied or condemned in this exhibition. Rather, translation will be accentuated and exposed. The works here presented have been displaced from their original contexts of production and reception, and therefore have already suffered a first dislocation. Their disembedment from a familiar surrounding and posterior relocation in the U.S. is meant to provoke frictions in their own possibilities of translation (linguistic, material, and metaphorical) that will spark a wider range of signification. The desire is to generate encounters and fractures of meaning by the exposure of the processes of transmigration that each work evokes, displays, and sets in action.

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The selected artists work with the movement and relocation of a diversity of forms, iconographies, mediums, languages, and technologies. Each work presented tells a different story of migration. Even though Francisca Aninat, Carmen Ariztía, Felipe Baeza, Joaquín Cociña, Paula Dittborn, and Francisco Schwember pertain to the same generation, sharing a common artistic milieu and education while belonging to the same ‘national’ background, this relative homogeneity is only a formal background meant to enhance the artists’ differences and the difficulties of circumscribing in a neatly defined area any shared particularity. What does it mean that all these artists come from the same Art School and make up a specific generation when their works are removed from Chile? Does such knowledge affect the interpretation of their work? In this exhibition the objects of translation offer no uniformity in spite of its place of ‘origin.’ What these artists share is a constant effort to transform their referents, questioning their underlying models of knowledge by remaining too far and too near from their parameters.

As the resulting works are now forced to travel and relocate in a different place, this exhibition means to pose the questions: how many acts of translation are needed for these works to become understandable and experienced in a context different from the one of origin? Do these works ‘translate’ when removed? Is there a “good” or proper translation? And, can the works function and provide meaning without acts of translation?

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Carmen Ariztía works with the materialization and objectification of language. Beginning with word combinations that refer to common objects or describe familiar situations, Carmen Ariztía produces objects made out of human remains that correspond and literalize the meaning of the words’ names. A hairbrush becomes a brush made out of human hair and a nail scissor is built of real nails. Deadly cadavers of what was most intimate and familiar to each person such as teeth, hair, and nails, these bodily fragments are separated from their original setting (the body as a whole, unified subject) and are accumulated, collected, and later translated into the objects they help to name. In the process of becoming estranged from the corporality to which they belonged, these bodily residues are transformed into new objects that propose a different relationship with the spectator. The viewer acts as the subject of language, endowing the phrases with meaning by recognizing the objects and their names, and at the same time the spectator can relate to the objects in their ordinary materiality, recognizing their origins and connecting to his or hers own body as an object. The conceptual, linguistic, and perceptual realities come together through bodily filiations, though these are relationships established through the defamiliarization of the subject from its own body provoked by a small death (cutting one’s nails or hair). Carmen Ariztía’s works also put forward the question of what happens when these phrases and word relations are translated from Spanish into English. Does the meaning, the syntactical and bodily connection, remain the same? How does the spectator relate to these objects when words suffer themselves a transformation?
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Paula Dittborn translates images from local television and foreign movies into fragments of color made out of plasticine reproducing the colorful dots that conform the images in television screens. While evoking the blurred visual effects of pointillism, Dittborn’s appropriated television images are given volume and weight: the plasticine she uses weighs down images that are composed of a fluid and invisible light beam projected in the television apparatus. By giving material consistency to the intangible and endowing with depth what is deemed superficial and transient, Dittborn transforms the immaterial and fleeting banality of media imagery into a solid object, which is nevertheless installed through a fragile, ‘soft’ medium of light adherence that threatens to collapse.

The images come from either well-known movie sequences, such as The Sound of Music, television broadcast news and interviews, or from family home made videos. They offer recognizable scenes from cinema’s history as well as familiar images of melodramatic moments that make up everyday life and which find themselves reflected in the highly dramatized world of soap operas. The sentimental rhetoric of cultural mass media are congealed by means of plasticine stumps into static images of contrived poses whose dramatic content is reinforced in the subtitles that accompany them. The inclusion of subtitles in Spanish and English (frozen words often translating less than what is actually being said or not corresponding with their referents at all) points to the foreign origin of the images, yet their exact provenance or destination remains in obscurity. Whether the images come from Hollywood or a peripheral location seems to matter less than the fact that they are translatable, readable through their spectacular display of stock feelings. Dittborn’s plasticine windows expose the artificiality in content that is paralleled in the transparent hollowness of television as a medium.

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The use of iconographic material whose referents are found in mass culture is further explored in the monumental charcoal and metallic pen drawings of Joaquín Cociña. Cociña derives his images from reproductions taken out of a weekly encyclopedia of cinematic history (Encyclopedia Salvat) sold on Chilean newsstands during the late seventies and early eighties as a fast and easily digestible way of learning about classic Western movies. The drawings begin as exact copies of traditional three-quarter black and white portraits and movie stills of well-known actors and actresses such as Cary Grant. Through a process of erasure and sfumatto the characters’ portraits begin to metamorphose into bland allusions to familiar melodramatic narratives in cinema that each title encapsulates in highly theatrical sentences. The satirical titles (“They had to part because of ethical reasons”) reflect Cociña’s doubt regarding the images’ origin and destination, as he ironically shuffles the smoothness and glitter of the reproducible surfaces for a hand-made, smudged effect that tampers with the media’s appearance of perfection. Moving away from the photomechanical system of reproduction that gave the stills birth and set them into commercial circulation, Cociña insists on rubbing the images as he draws them, as if they were sacred idols whose mere touch could produce miracles. This process of effacement and obstruction of the ‘original’ is not only exacerbated by the cloudy effects of charcoal, but further estranged by cutting off the portraits at random angles and then surrounding them with hand-drawn hatched, stark, brilliant backgrounds. The angular cuts and almost flat planes of color surrounding the figures produce uncanny compositions of towering black and white giants suspended in an ambiguous space of in-betweenness: between the badly done handcraft and the spectacular limpidness of the industrially reproduced image where referents are altered quotes of themselves.

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The reproduction of what has already been reproduced is an issue that can be found in Felipe Baeza’s digitalized animation inspired by Vermeer’s famous Girl with a Pearl Earring. The fact that Vermeer’s painting has been infinitely reproduced, recently becoming the subject of a novel and then an English movie, underlines the reproducible character of art through different means of mechanical reproduction in our era. In the case of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, the transition from the painting to the photograph and then to moving images is taken over by Baeza so as to explore the connections between Western media, cultural industry, and art history. The technology Baeza uses resembles that of movie studios making blockbuster action films such as The Matrix, in which a single moment is spectacularly detained to show different angles of an action-taking place at high speed. Baeza translates this technological advancement, which finds a historical lineage that joins the Baroque to the concerns of Muybridge and Cubism, by reverting the fast pace of the future into a reflection on the passing of time. Borne from a photographic process in which nine cameras shoot sequentially a model posing and dressed up as Vermeer’s model in the painting Girl with a Pearl Earring, the photographs are then digitalized and later animated. The spectator must stand for a few moments contemplating the screen and the solicitous gaze of the model to recognize that the image displayed slowly rotates, the angle of vision turning in 45 degrees, from left to right and back. The view of the scene is offered from different angles that fluidly melt into each other, attempting to capture in its slow movement the passing of time as it is frozen in a single instant, a crucial aim to Baroque painters. If Vermeer’s work attempted to offer a sudden glimpse of everyday Dutch life in the seventeenth century, opening a window to an intimate moment, detaining and stopping time only in order to expose it as it fleets away (as exemplified in the glow of the girl’s eyes, the moisture on her lips, the axis on which she herself is rotated and gazes from), Baeza’s work recuperates that desire to detain a moment of time, only to expand it and reveal its corporeality. The digitalization of the photographs offers the precise contours of a passing instant, a drawing of time that can be grasped in a series of viewpoints, which transforms the high pace of the movie effect into a quiet contemplation of decay.

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Francisco Schwember also deals with portraiture, only this time through representational painting. Schwember starts from another means of mechanical reproduction, photography, taking shots of family and landscapes which he uses as separate fragments to compose detailed theatrical settings in which full length realistic portraits of friends and family co-exist with minimalist architecture and natural spaces. Citing scenes, poses, titles, and motifs from historical and religious paintings, his subjects are usually at odds with their surroundings, either menaced by or alienated from the ample spaces that envelop them. The grand scale of a compact and yet untamed, lush nature is transformed into an unfamiliar environment that threatens to take over, and the hard-edged architectural settings where familiar gestures take place act as modern ruins or abandoned stages in which these actors assert a muted and diminished human presence. The intimacy suggested by the poses is upset by the space left unpainted in the canvas, as stories unsaid, an intruding blankness that breaks down the representational aims of painting, pointing to its own artificiality and materiality. The exposure of the painting’s formal properties echoes the lack of depth and identity of the painted locations, twisting traditional biblical motifs into contemporary allegories of a solitary modern landscape.

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The formal characteristics of painting are an important aspect of Francisca Aninat’s work. She rethinks the corporeality of painting as a fragile materiality that is able to hold itself together merely by its seams. Exploring the material and theoretical supports of painting in a time when installation and new media have become an almost official language, having a long history of challenging traditional artistic practices, Aninat deconstructs pictorial tradition to its basic elements: color, plane, canvas-fabric, and then conducts an act of reparation of painting which nevertheless involves its progressive dismantling.
Aninat begins by loosely applying dense pigment on the canvas, dying the fabric with few colors, and then tearing the pigmented support into shreds. Recollecting the pieces, she stitches the scraps in expanding surfaces of painted material, the joints of which exhibit the reparatory action but also make evident the fragility of the new painting’s unions. When hanged, the weight of the painted canvas pulls down the subtle needlework, forcing the painting to gradually fall under its own burden. The processual nature of painting is exhibited and also manifests the material load of painting’s past, reflecting at the same time the precariousness of the manual work that is associated to it; a handling that has suffered recurrent blows from new technologies and yet is still there to sustain it. Aninat’s dismantling of painting is an act of deconstruction and exhibition of a pictorial tradition that hangs on its lasts threads.
Francisca Aninat unravels the support of painting to reveal its weight, fragility, transparency, and density as an unfolding of threads. Prepared canvases are slowly unraveled into its basic components, closely woven threads, forming masses of light textile that fall into flexible sculptural forms that transform the rectangular frame of the painting. This act of expansion and deconstruction is continued in sewn paintings that are hanged from the ceiling, forming amorphous volumes that forcefully weight down the painting and reveal its precarious condition and aspirations of verticality. The activation of space is once again sought through the paintings horizontal growth, taking over the surfaces of the gallery’s walls as a breaking away from the constrictions and limits of the canvas.