Projects — Saehee Cho

Statement of Intent, April 2013

Translation is Mediation is Transmittance is Conversation

I am interested in translation in its most active state, the process, the rendering from one form to another. I am interested it what comes undone, what is propagated, the ways in which meaning shivers loose and moves towards a spread in the act of translation. In other words, I am interested in the “in transit” part of translation.

During my residency as guest editor for Outward From Nothingness, I hope to address translation from the lens of semantics, uncoupling it from the common perception of conversion of one language into another and expanding the definition of translation as an act between signs- translation as a magnifying glass for the already loose associations between the signified and the signifier, translation as a conduit for meaning, an agent of deliberate change.

This month Outward From Nothingness will feature the 1°-1° Interviews, a series of paired interviews between artists of various mediums. In each pairing I will use one interview as source material for the second interview. In this way I want to not only populate the content of the blog with ideas of translation as mediation as conversation but to use the form of the interview as an act of translation/mediation/transmittance/conversation.

In addition I will be posting The Telephone Series, roughly based on the childhood game. One artist will offer up work that will then be passed to several artists who will translate the work and then pass it on for further translation. The intention is to distort, to breed a change and bring to question what can come undone in the act of translation. My hope is to bring to the surface not only the narrative that arises in transit, but also the pleasure in the movement itself.

Thank you to the contributors and to the editors of Out of Nothing—Janice Lee, Joe Milazzo, & Eric Lindley. And stay tuned for contributions by Douglas Kearney, Marcus Civin, Bruna Mori, Bhanu Kapil, Hands, Nancy Romero, Ani Raya-Flores, Felipe W.Martinez, Christina Wood Martinez, Henry Hoke, John Washington, Sean Sullivan, Tisa Bryant, Thomas Trudgeon, Travis Diehl, Cliff Weber and more.