Dispersing Knowledge, or the Role of Translators

For the occasion of 57th Venice Biennale, Davide Quadrio wrote an essay about the curator of China Pavilion Qiu Zhijie, to analyse Qiu’s important role in contemporary art.

Dispersing Knowledge, or the Role of Translators

“They musicked a resistance, defying any kind of definition.”

text/Davide Quadrio

In this time where authoritarian populism, as Stuart Hall defined this era in Europe, is clearly bringing the world into a dismembered body of fear, nihilism and inequality , it seems to me that the necessity of working on dispersing knowledge to confront fear should be at the centre of a counter revolutionary tendency. When humanism is at the verge of being destroyed, stronger should be the enactment of cultural bridges.
This enactment though is not a (post)imperialist idea of “moving” content or creating “exposure” to the Other, as so often observed. It is the force that goes beyond this “transporting” exoticism. It is the force that empowers “translators” and “cross-cultural activators” as connectors in the uncertain territory of the “in-between”.

When I talk about “translators” I refer to a particular category of cultural mediators (individuals, groups and institutions) that, clustering together or with independent actions, place themselves in a position of fragility. Being a translator entails the adoption of a standpoint where mistakes are inevitable and should somehow be embraced. Translators are creating knowledge through making, are powerhouses who –by living physically and intellectually in between cultures and languages– define and keep renegotiating meanings (semantic) and references (visual, cultural, historical). This means that the act of interpreting creates bridging forces between cultural clusters, where translations are journeys more than start-finishing points. With this process translators shape what we can define as “hybridity”, the underline motif that allows the creation of a cross-cultural language. Translating bears the responsibility of drafting the abc of a common alphabet that simultaneously considers several sources, meanings and references that are not per se coming from a specific privileged system or hegemonic cultural references.

Following the above, this fragile knowledge through making (tentative, instable and not absolute) is often an alternative to Academia, which reacts to the world with a scientific method reflected in what I see as the crystalized knowledge fixed in the dark, seamless Sky of Human History.

In this sense, the fluidity with which artists and cultural makers build bridges between cultures –Qiu Zhijie being an excellent example of this practice– stand as a new paradigm for the creation of a general zone of freedom from fear, limits, and simplifications.

This free zone that allow us to observe the world (in Chinese shi世， the multitude of sentient beings), reshapes it at the same time; artists, institutions and operators are able to claim the emotional as a tool to generate unstable truths that even if stemming from intuitions are nonetheless real. Intuitions themselves have always proven to be germinal in the establishment of a myriad vectorial truths –even scientific ones– soliciting complex revelations.

In this interstice of unstable cultural existence artists and cultural producers are the key keeper –with responsibilities that have ethical repercussions– of the interspaces between cultural worlds. It is for this reason that artists and cultural producers need to act more than ever within the cracks in between systems, not only in their cultural realms but also in their structural embodiments: institutions, economy, the political world.

However, as cultural translators might need to engage with political bodies, the same can happen on the other direction, when politics affects transcultural communication with problematic repercussions. The same emotional response that can be used as an eye-opening tool can become a controlling device, in a sort of mutated version. This becomes clear in the recent open letter written in a colloquial Chinese by President Xi Jinping, in which he compares Marxism and Buddhism as systems that share in their original messages the same goal of pacifying society.

“Communism can learn from Buddhism. Truly, yes it can! And in particular, learning what? Universal love and unselfishness.”

If this idea of emotional response and deviation into a possible tool of control is valid, artists and producers in the cross-cultural sphere should be actors of change, hijacking those systems, working in between, engaging with them, responding with the creation of languages of dissent.

It is in this context that Qiu represents an ideal example of the sophistication of an artist as go-between, where his visions and the vagueness of his ideas –as an artist, merchant, teacher, political activist– become strong, resolute, profound and clear gestures and images. Without the proper mediation and interpretation that the in-between language can offer, these images remain silent in a context outside the Greater China.

For this reasons the discursive framework proposed by the curatorial team together with the artist, as well as the transcultural focus of the present publication that you hold in your hands, represent an attempt to challenge the audience with a shift of perception. This exhibition wants to feed with new ways of reading the artworks, the philosophy, the history of Qiu’s works, life, actions.

On a more personal level, this focus on the creation of interpretative tools represents a new direction for Arthub, the organization I founded and directed since 2007, in response to the necessity of a new cross-cultural vocabulary.

To conclude, the first retrospective in Europe by Qiu Zhijie becomes for us an interesting experiment of a travelling exhibition that, through the “fragile” work of interpreting, decoding and translating, will adapt and morph according to the various contexts in which it will be presented. Only through this complex transcultural work this exhibition will become a successful journey without a final –and predictable– arrival.

Davide Quadrio, Taipei, 1st February 2017