cloudiness
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video essay / lecture performance, 2021, HD video, 14 mins 41 seconds
CLOUDINESS is a video essay by Sophie Seita that plays with the materiality and tactility of translation within and beyond language. Translation as movement. As visual-haptic echo chamber. Is translation always the retracing of shapes already carved, of thoughts already voiced, now tasked with a different sort of materialisation on a variable scale of proximity? Experimental translations, in particular, make their scaffolding visible. To intentionally upset the truism of translational invisibility, the scaffold visualises a material process. This making-visible does not aim for a transparency of meaning. Instead, experimental translations side with a certain cloudiness...
Originally commissioned by Anna Luhn & Lena Hintze, for THE GAME(S) OF TRANSLATION, in collaboration with LCB (Literarisches Colloquium Berlin) & TOLEDO, & the Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities. Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” at Freie Universität Berlin. Captions by Robert Steffani.
Exhibition:
Crossing Borders, group show, curated by Hannah Imhoff, Millbank, London. Install photos: Monika Drabot; preview photo: Vera Kern
There’s no way I can know it, the object, or the body, two-person show, Hoxton253, London, 2022. Install shot: Mirko Boffelli. Stills taken from video by the artist.
Screening:
Bard College (2022)
Newham Word Fest (2022)
87Press/Cafe Oto, 2023
CLOUDINESS is a video essay by Sophie Seita that plays with the materiality, tactility, and politics of translation within and beyond language.