Slavs and Tatars: Transliterative Tease (2013–present) Event

PERFORMANCE

Transliterative Tease explores the potential for transliteration – the conversion of scripts – as a strategy equally of resistance and research into notions such as identity politics, colonialism, and faith.
Presented by the department of Sprachkunst and the department of Transkulturelle Studien. Lecture Performance in English

Through the lens of phonetic, semantic, and theological slippage, Transliterative Tease explores the potential for transliteration – the conversion of scripts – as a strategy equally of resistance and research into notions such as identity politics, colonialism, and faith.
The lecture-performance focuses on the Turkic languages of the former Soviet Union, as well as the eastern and western frontiers of the Turkic sphere, namely Anatolia and Xinjiang/Uighuristan.

Lenin believed that the revolution of the east begins with the Latinization of the alphabets of all Muslim subjects of the USSR. The march of alphabets has always accompanied that of empires – Arabic with the rise of Islam, Latin with that of Roman Catholicism, and Cyrillic with the Orthodox Church and subsequently communism. This lecture-performance attempts not to emancipate peoples or nations but rather the sounds rolling off our tongues.

About Rough Translation:

Which language do I speak – in a hierarchy of languages? How to translate politics into poetry? And what is happening during the transformation? How to perform it, as a poem? How can an artistic use of language oppose propaganda, fake news, disinformation? Can it do that at all? And can we translate poetry into political praxis?
As part of ROUGH TRANSLATION, we would like to address these questions in a series of readings and performances in Vienna.