ON TRANSLATION – learning to become untranslatable, becoming the lacuna (the gap), to be beyond translation
the heft is not ‘translatability’ as in ‘replaceability’, but in being unknown, not being replaceable / commensurable with another

to resist translation is to resist being subsumed into the processes and logics of racialisation and capitalist exploitation.
to remain not as the Other in relation to a separate body, but to be internal/opaque, to look inside, to avert the gaze inwards…

we formations:
a manual based directly on the personally transcribed script of an Act of Xala. A method of appropriating methods of ‘becoming untranslatable’ whilst being a world that demands translatability from me.
this manual will be based a series of instructions for bodily movement that in themselves will resist translation.

goal of the exercise:
how to use the performative which is frequently linked with forms of exposing injustices; we hope to turn the performance into an instrument of concealment by inscribing the methods within the film.

join us for a 45-min excerpt of Ousmane Sembene’s film Xala, followed by a collective performance and a roundtable discussion.