Borders, Nations, Translations. The Political Limits of Cultural Trans-Nationali Event

Conference, 14 - 15 March 2008

Home is where I understand and where I am understood, wrote Karl Jaspers once. If this home today is our globalized world, then its mother tongue cannot be but a translation, both linguistically and culturally. And yet, what if we want this home to have a political meaning, to be the place of freedom, justice and equality for all of us? Should we form a nation of translation and claim its sovereignty in an independent state? Who translates betrays: mother tongues, borders and, above all, the old political dreams. The betrayers of all the nations will never form a nation of their own. It is time for a new challenge. Is it possible to articulate the emerging trans-national culture of translation in non-cultural terms or, in other words, are we able to translate a trans-national cultural space into a common trans-cultural political action?

Boris Buden, Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodriguez, Rada Iveković, Sandro Mezzadra, Klaus Neundlinger, Stefan Nowotny, Jon Solomon, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Hito Steyerl, Tom Waibel, Michaela Wolf

12.00–15.00 Panel 3
Moderation: Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodriguez

Michaela Wolf
Nation of Translation – Nation as Translation:
Charting Perspectives of Trans-cultural Political Action

Sandro Mezzadra
The Labor of Translation
Imagining the Politics of Translation Beyond Communication and Articulation

Boris Buden
Faithful to Whom: Fidelity of Translation as Political Question

15.00–15.30 Break

15.30–18.30 Panel 4
Moderation: Hito Steyerl

Jon Solomon
Rethinking the Meaning of Regions: Translation and Catastrophe

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Varieties of Transculture

Party
DJ-Team: first fatal kiss