“Mi accorgevo che meno sapevo, più sperimentavo.”
I realised that the less I knew, the more I experimented.
(Candiani, 2021, pg. 8, our translation)
In today’s complex societies where multiple languages and modalities are simultaneously used for communication and learning, a question is how to develop enhanced literacies that can support individuals and communities to meet each other and dialogue across diversity.
For these reasons, although we are not expert in linguistics, I took the chance to become member of The Experiential Translation Network, a group of international scholars, artists and translators who investigate translation between languages (interlingual) and between media (intersemiotic) as a method of creation and communication, as a method for learning and teaching, collaboration and participation within multilingual, multicultural and multimodal settings.
The project "Experiential Translation: Meaning making, engagement and agency across media in a multimodal world", King’s College University, 2020-2022, aimed at developing practice-based methods for participatory workshops that took place from April 2021 to July 2022 in network countries (UK, Portugal, Poland, Spain, Hungary, Italy & Hong Kong) and were conducted by network participants working in scholar-artist teams.
In Italy, my colleague Silvia Luraschi and I partnered with the artist choreographer Cinzia Delorenzi to conduct an experiential translation of her solo performance Ospitare and of two poems by the contemporary poet Antonella Anedda. We called our local project Ospitare / Hosting others.
You can read more on the ETN website blog: The invisible process of research , Ospitare / Hosting others workshop 2 , Hosting others: translating in Canada .
We published one academic article (Open Access):
- Del Negro, G., Luraschi, S., Delorenzi, C., & El Saadany, D. (2022). Ospitare/Hosting Others: Looking for Traces of Transformation in Adults Through Somatic and Artistic Relational Work. Teraźniejszość–Człowiek–Edukacja, 24(2 (92)), 9-30. ISSN PDF Open Access: 1505-8808 https://insted-tce.pl/ojs/index.php/tce/article/view/500/448
Silvia and I keep spreading the seeds of this project.
In 2022 we toured UK, Norway and Canada:
- Gallery talk: Gaia Del Negro and Silvia Luraschi with Cinzia Delorenzi & Filippo M. Ceredi, Trame ecologiche: Experiential translation as practice of ecological weaving, in the Performative & Experiential Translation: Meaning making through Language, Art, and Media, King's College London, 13-15 July 2022 https://experientialtranslation.net/research/conference/.
- Workshop: Gaia Del Negro and Silvia Luraschi, Art and space – collaborative work (in progress), Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen, Norway, 7th December 2022
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Workshop: Gaia Del Negro and Silvia Luraschi, Ospitare / Hosting others. Experiential translation as practice of ecological weaving, at the Center for Global Studies, University of Victoria, Canada, Friday, November 18th 2022 https://www.uvic.ca/research/centres/globalstudies/
In 2023 we held the online workshop: “Experiential translation and creative life writing” for the CANI-NET Collaborative Artful Narrative Inquiry Network, 2023 March 6thhttps://cani-net.com
In 2023 and 2024 we held experiential translation workshops in Milan with students of Arabic, Chinese and Japanese in the BA course in Intercultural Communication, University of Milano Bicocca.
Photo: Gaia Del Negro, Art and space – collaborative work (in progress), Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen, Norway, 7th December 2022
Photo: Gaia Del Negro, Art and space – collaborative work (in progress), Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen, Norway, 7th December 2022