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

Friday, 14 March

12.00 Opening
Therese Kaufmann, Boris Buden

12.30 - 15.30 Panel 1
Moderation: Boris Buden

Rada Iveković
Translating Borders

Stefan Nowotny
The Multiple Faces of the “Civis”, or: Is Citizenship Translateable?

Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodriguez
Transculturalising Affect – On Migration and Domestic/Care Work

15.30–16.00 Break

16.00–19.00 Panel 2
Moderation: Stefan Nowotny

Tom Waibel
Privateers in the Sea of Signs. Biopiracy and Politics of Translation

Hito Steyerl
Travelling Images

Klaus Neundlinger
Simultaneous – New Paradigms of Productivity
Will the Form of Space Replace the Form of Wage Labour?