Lecture Performance at Villa Sträuli, Winterthur, during the Art Writers' Award 2022 Residency, supported by Take on Art Magazine and Pro Helvetia New Delhi. This is part of Ranjana Dave's research on the relationship between spoken language and the body in performance, and the practices of translation that enable transfers of meaning between them.
How does language shape the body in performance? This lecture performance locates its imagination of language in what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls the habitus, which he describes as the learned set of preferences or dispositions by which a person orients to the social world - what they like, how they present themselves, and also how they make meaning of things. To speak of language, then, is to speak of identity: of how we belong to specific times, places, communities, or ideas.
Here, the process of translation is a site for shifting meanings, where codes become actions, where an idea is fermented into another form. And all these things happen across mediums or modes of transmission, bouncing between performance, works of cultural theory, popular culture and daily life. Translation as a site and process of meaning-making allows us to consider the question of identity. To identify with something or someone is to perform belonging. How do we create systems of belonging? How do we perform belonging?
Video by Sergey Onischenko