The Politics of Translation: Beyond Text and Into Images

Jazael Olguín Zapata -

This lecture discusses translation as a process that transcends language, extending into visual and material realms.

For whom do you translate? Why do we engage in translation, and to what public(s) do we regard when publishing our translational works? As artists, editors, self-publishers, and designers, we are in translation all the time—transporting ideas to materials, conversations to editions, intuitions to specific contextual practices. 

This lecture addresses the limitations of Western knowledge when dealing with the magical, spiritual orders, communitarian politics, encrypted narratives, and more. If we approach contemporary art and its relationship with language and then with politics of extraction, typical of the Western translatorial fixation in the face of the strange and the uncertain, how do we reposition questions that collapse in this specific and hegemonic vision of language?

How do we establish spaces where we can embody images as texts? How can we then promote reading as a non-linear action, abundant in open lectures and prefigurations of unexpected futures? 

De-figuring these questions from an anticolonial perspective, the lecture brings back the specters of drawing as writing, abstract comix-cartoon making, Mesoamerican pictographic writing, and Chinese calligraphy’s relationship with spirituality. It values the practices of mistranslation, non-interpretation, bad translation, and translation between medias. From writing to radio to performative art, it examines the potential of opaque comprehensibility and untranslatability as an incomplete vital potency within publishing practices and beyond.

Event language: English with close-captions.

Jazael Olguín Zapata (he/him) is an editor and self-publisher whose work searches for crossroads between genres and media and the interstices between drawing, writing, and painting. Jazael enjoys mixing times and art history references with pop imaginaries from fragmented and fluid identities narratives, blurring the boundaries between genres, writing systems, spaces, and disciplines. He insists that these are not only a way of producing unique images and texts that are relevant to address the present context of our localities and of the world(s), but they also have relevance within contemporary visual culture. Jazael is the co-founder of Cooperativa Cráter Invertido and several self-publishing initiatives, and has produced many zines, collaborations, propaganda, shows, etc., and a graphic novel in 2019 titled LLoverá sobre Egipto después del fin del mundo. More recently, he was invited to do the documentation of conversations or assemblies through drawing for the Organization as a Medium of Contemporary Art at Kunstraum of Lüneburg University, Germany in 2023, as well as documentafifteen (2022), and Sharjah art foundation (2023). He has also been an active member of the Arts Collaboratory ecosystem since 2014.

REGISTER HERE

By registering for this lecture series, you not only enter a transnational community centered around design politics, but you also support the work of commissioning, editing, and publishing original counter-narratives, and help to finance our free online learning program.

The lecture series is accessible through a sliding-scale price structure:

  • Solidarity: CHF 290
  • Standard: CHF 150
  • Student: CHF 70
  • Reduced Student: CHF 35

For students with limited finances—particularly those self-identifying as marginalized, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, chronically ill, or disabled—we offer the Reduced Student price. We trust your honesty and do not require proof of self-identification for enrollment.

For institutions keen on facilitating their students’ and staff’s participation (and other bigger groups), we also provide discounted passes. Please contact learning@futuress.org along with the number of participating students and staff, and we would be happy to tailor an offer to your specific needs.

This event is part of the Pressing Issues: Printing Futures, Publishing Resistance paid online series of lectures, tutorials, and roundtable conversations discussing the politics of translating, archiving, and publishing.


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