Laura August // Untranslating a biennial: or, starting from the point of failure
Untranslating a biennial: or, starting from the point of failure
Published in the XXI Bienal Paiz catalog
Design by Yavheni de León
Fundación Paiz: Guatemala City, 2019
As we ride to Sumpango together, a visiting curator tells me that she doesn't think a biennial can work in Central America. She is speaking after the final Bienal Centroamericana, and from an organization that has been innovative in re-thinking what research and exhibitions allow in a context as multifaceted and complex as Central America. She is probably right.
And so, what if we take that idea of the biennial’s failure as a starting point?
Can a biennial be a way of productively short-circuiting conversations about art and culture, leaving them without the agreed-upon words and ways of thinking?
In this iteration, the XXI Paiz developed relationships with existing artistic communities and projects across Guatemala, using many of its resources to support pre-existing projects such as Canal Cultural en San Pedro La Laguna, Sololá, or to redevelop a ceremonial site in Comalapa, or to create a festival de barriletes in Sumpango. The idea was to move past an artistic event, even as we moved out of the city center, and to try to make meaningful sites of engagement.
In his short video La lógica de la interpretación, poet Julio Serrano Echeverría took on the act of interpretation as a way of thinking about how we enter communities distinct from our own. Thinking from language encounters, Serrano's video considers his reliance on a Kaqchikel interpreter in Santiago Atitlán. "Aquel que interpreta está siempre saltando de un mundo a otro con la astucia propia de los felinos," he writes.
To move between is also a fundamental action of a biennial.
To move lightly between worlds should always be its hope.
In his essay "Biennials: Four Fundamentals, Many Variations," Terry Smith writes:
biennials are forms of cultural exchange between nations, enacted at a regional center; specifically, they encourage negotiation between local and international artworlds, conducted at distances within both. This rather complex quality is the source of much that is positively distinctive––indeed, world changing––about biennials, as well as of much of the confusion, over-hyping, and sense of failed expectation, that they also seem to engender... If the biennial began, in 1895, as an ideal form for internationalizing local artworlds (at least within the centers and peripheries of Europe), we could say that, now, it has become one among the many forms that are assisting to localize and regionalize the international...[1]
For their "Attempt at the Reconstruction of a Mural," Tercerunquinto attempted to reconstruct one of Carlos Mérida's murals completed in Mexico in the 1950s. The project looks at loss and historical patrimony from the instinct of recreation. What does it mean to remake something destroyed by natural disaster in another context, itself marked by recent (and recurring) natural disasters? Together with a team of volunteers, the artists searched for ripio across Guatemala City, hoping to find enough material to build one of the murals from the Multifamiliar Benito Juarez, destroyed in the 1985 earthquake. What they learned, in the context of Guatemala City, was that construction debris is quite difficult to encounter, all of it repurposed immediately. The resulting mural is incomplete, marked as much by absence as by the presence of chunks of debris (perhaps also a fitting metaphor for the act of making a biennial).
With their research process on view at the Casa de la Memoria (Guatemala City's museum to remember and research the country's armed conflict and genocide), Tercerunquinto’s Intento de reconstrucción de un mural touched upon different ways in which each nation approaches loss, cultural patrimony, and history. And seen in dialogue with Empapelados by H.I.J.O.S. at Casa Celeste, what could have been an architectural exercise about Mérida's legacy quickly became a way of reproaching history for its absences, making space for violent loss to be visible. In this way, Guatemala localized the international.
Simón Vega's Apollo-Soyuz-Chapultepec Project, places the history of the Space Race within the local specificities of the tropical third world. Here, the two parts of the Cold War-era docking capsule fail to connect with one another, breaking apart at the moment they should find common ground (another potent metaphor for making a biennial). Inside the two capsules, Vega creates a striking counterpoint: in one, the viewer sees images of the 1975 Miss Universe pageant held in San Salvador. In the other, we see newsreel footage of a student massacre in El Salvador. Placing the burden of the civil war on the trickle-down of Cold War economic and military strategies from the US and USSR, Vega writes local history through the international visual language of the Space Race; and, simultaneously, he rewrites international history through the local events of 1975.
"Nobody knows what a biennale should be, and that’s its strength," notes Juliana Engberg.[2] After the IXX Paiz Biennial opened in 2014, RARA magazine, one of the only print publications in Guatemala that writes about art, published a review. At the top of the two-page spread, the editors noted: “This is what we have to say about the Paiz Biennial." Beneath the caption, the two pages remained blank.
At the Facultad de Arquitectura at the Universidad de San Carlos, Christopher Ticas and José Oquendo (El Colectivo) installed seven piñatas that spelled out the word PALABRA (WORD). Together with students at the university, biennial artists, curators, and visitors thwacked the piñatas until they disintegrated, the word becoming fragmented pieces, absent of meaning, meaning collaboratively destroyed. The absurdity of the gesture is a hallmark of the artists’ collaborations, which began with their work as professional clowns. It was at once liberating and deeply silly.
And yet, there is something interwoven with the empty pages of RARA here, something about the absence of a critical language to explain what a biennial means in a place like Guatemala (or a place like anywhere), something about what it means to destroy the stability of the word and allow (dejar) something untranslatable or broken in its place.
"The only way to begin to understand is not to understand," write Jen Hofer and John Pluecker, in their Manifesto for Ultratranslation.[3] "Rather than running away from the untranslatable, scorning it or eyeing it suspiciously, or lamenting the loss it represents, we experience the untranslatable as invitation to further immersion, further closeness."[4] This facing of misunderstanding, they term ultratranslation:
“Moments of untranslatability lead directly to untranslation, undertranslation, overtranslation, an excess, extranslation, a lack, a limit, an excrescence, an impropriety, distranslation, retranslation, multitranslation, a mistake, a conflict, dystranslation. An understanding of the potential in not understanding. An ultratranslation…
Ultra: spatially beyond, on the other side, indicating elsewhere. Ultra: going beyond, surpassing, transcending the limits. Ultra: an excessive or extreme degree.”[5]
We might find un/ultra/under/over/ex-translatability in the entire project of Más Allá, and this might be a liberatory failure of discourse: in the moment the docking station fails to dock, we see the underbelly of history, the truths a successful connection might have obscured.
At each site of the biennial, visitors could have their biennial passport stamped with “más allá,” translated into one of the more than 20 Maya languages alive in Guatemala. Several of these languages choose not to have an equivalent term for the Spanish or English arte/art. Instead, in these languages, someone making art would be asked to describe the specific nature of what they are doing. In such a language, to be a sculptor might be to carve a stone, to create an installation might be to fill a space.
To move beyond, to be outside, to push past, to negate a word and ask, instead, for a description of the gesture being made: if, instead of saying “art,” we had to describe the thing being done here, how might we begin? If we are to think about this specific biennial in Guatemala as both an ever-changing exhibitionary project and, simultaneously, a biennial that localizes the international, we quickly find points of ultratranslation. At these sites, perhaps the best thing we can offer is description.
In Correspondencia, Hellen Ascoli and Jorge de León presented a project-in-process based upon their experiences of distance from one another and, more specifically, Ascoli's distance from Guatemala, after moving to the United States. Informed by her walks through her new environment, a lakeside neighborhood in Madison, Wisconsin, Ascoli began collecting images and sending them with notes, letters, and texts, to De León. How does one touch a friend over distance?
The act of letter-writing, with its hand-made immediacy, offers a kind of extended touch over long spaces. And yet, in Guatemala, the national mail service was dismantled in 2016. The impossibility of sending letters—this state-sanctioned resistance to touch—left the artists with a proposition that encompassed failure. De León made postcards of Guatemala, hand drawing grotesque scenes from the news, even as he knew they would never go through the nonexistent mail system. Indeed, news of the daily violence of here rarely reaches there: this violence hits a wall of ultratranslation. While Jorge drew his postcards, Hellen sent images from her daily walks, finding the boundaries of the familiar and unfamiliar in her photographs. The frustrated exchange became a kind of unweaving.
In an interview with Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, curator of the 33rd São Paulo Biennial, Leyla Dunia asks him to think about the biennial starting from the idea of failure:
L.D.: Decía Luis Pérez-Oramas cuando le tocó organizar la bienal que más bien partía desde la idea de fracaso…
G.P.B.: Totalmente, y me lo recordó el otro día. Tratas con una imposibilidad, y tiene que ver con esa cuestión utópica: lo único que puedes hacer es apuntar hacia una dirección posible. Creo que es muy importante preguntar para qué y para quién son estas bienales, cuál es la función.[6]
Perez-Barreiro describes how, over the past 20 years, biennials have been curated thematically, with works of art selected to match these themes. Breaking with this trend, he looks to the earliest history of the biennial:
¿Cuál fue el tema de la 2° Bienal, seguramente la más importante de la historia? No lo tuvo. ¿Y con qué tema trabajo Mário Pedrosa en la 6°? No era necesario entonces, y no creo que sea necesario hoy tampoco. El gran desafío, por supuesto, es pensar con qué reemplazarlo.[7]
“Esta edición de la Bienal Paiz no tendrá tema,” writes Gerardo Mosquera about the Bienal Paiz. “Más bien, el tema será su propia metodología. El sentido de la Bienal no se construirá así mediante la discusión de un asunto, sino a través de un modelo de acción… Precisamente, la noción de más allá será el eje de acción de la Bienal.”
At Concepción 41, the convent ruins in Antigua, Inés Verdugo installed a small house-like structure made of panela. The house sat amidst the ruins of previous projects, indeed even temporarily displaced one of the structures from Hellen Ascoli and Jay Sullivan’s exhibition My Body is Not Here. Titled Dulce Hogar, the structure was immediately swarmed by bees, who remained eating the panela (and dying below and around the house) through the month it was on view. As the elements destroyed the structure, it became more and more foreboding, the carcass of something built to fall apart, a sweet home turned bitter.
The most startling aspect of the sculpture was its sound. As bees swarmed, the space was filled with a wordless droning. At the opening weekend, it was still possible to enter the house and stand there looking out as bees crowded around your body, pushing their way to the blocks of sugar. Their contented working hum was almost soothing, but paired with a terrifying potential for great pain. That terror was wordless, signaled by the steady, overwhelming, cacophonous pulse of the insects. Deep panicked fear has no words, is untranslatable, is understood only by the body and its auto-responses, might be confused with calm.
In weight-training, the point of failure is the moment at which you can do no more. After over-loading your body, it becomes unable to complete the task at hand and forces you to stop. The muscle fibers are torn. It is precisely at this moment of failure that the muscle is starting the process of growth.
To move más allá is also to allow for moments of disconnect, of untranslatability, of failure, of miscommunication, of wordlessness, of overload. Perhaps these are the sites in which we grow.
Smith concludes, “As biennials everywhere become more institutionalized... it might become necessary to invent a different exhibitionary structure, one that manifests more acutely the antinomies of our present situation: its multiplicity, its layered cotemporalities, its proliferation of differences, and its increasingly desperate reach for a revised contract with the planet.”[8]
There is something fundamentally untranslatable about biennials that breaks the exhibitionary norm, which is also, perhaps, what makes them fit awkwardly with the local condition of their place.
“Two bodies with the negative space of relation between them,”[9] is how Hofer & Pluecker describe the relationship between a translation and something untranslatable. “Nothing is lost in translation. Everything was always already lost, long before we arrived.”[10]
After the biennial, an artist calls me to tell me that I am a bad curator. Although I had arranged all the logistics of her installation and smoothed her relationship with the site where she was working, I was not available enough for her as she resolved her piece. She is right. Deeply ill during install, I was forced to the doctor by my friends, and then heavily medicated. It took more than a month to recover and I was not present for her. This body failure, this curatorial “failure,” this forced slowness and disconnect might provoke anxiety in a world in which we must be always successful and “on” and understood and present.
But, in moments of failure, we also learn what is most important.
We must ask ourselves why make a biennial, for whom, where, and to what end. With Más Allá, we made a gesture outward, feeling into the interstices where we did not know things. We listened to communities and we invited people whose practices are not part of the art discourse to the table. In a place in which collaboration is unappreciated at best and violent at worst, we invited and sponsored numerous collaborative projects, sparking difficult conversations and many frustrations, but also centering this attempt at communicating. We often failed. And yet, I insist, to feel the boundaries of one’s knowledge, to push against the rough edges, to sit in discomfort: these are the sites and moments from which we grow.
“Translation is its own undoing,” write Hofer and Pluecker. They might be writing about how we find shared knowledge, where we meet, how two languages can run parallel and never find each other. At exactly that point of disconnect and miscommunication, there is more thinking to be done.
In Kevin Frank Pellecer’s series of photographs No permanecer en este lugar, he mixes images of Houston, Texas, with Guatemala City. Pellecer moves deftly between the places, finding points of invisibility and discomfort in the peripheries of each city’s image of itself. The places blend together in the viewer’s uncomfortable disassociation: here we are never clear where we are. Perhaps this gesture of placing things alongside each other is what a biennial is able to do best, and how it makes the local international, how it turns the international toward the local, how it destabilizes us, wherever we are.
Putting H.I.J.O.S. alongside Tercerunquinto makes the two proposals infinitely weighted with the reach of loss. Seeing El Colectivo’s PALABRA destroyed under the watchful gaze of Arnoldo Ramírez Amaya’s mural makes the gesture of destroying the word resonate in the context of a post-military dictatorship. We make space for “two bodies with the negative space of relation between them,” and we wander and push out, into failure, into the untranslatable, into the más allá.
And this is the small token a biennial might offer to a place that does not need a biennial: here in the untranslatability and the failure and the being with, we unlearn everything we thought we already knew.
—LAURA AUGUST, PhD
[1] Terry Smith, “Biennials: Four Fundamentals, Many Variations,” 2016.
[2] Cited in Natasha Hoare, Coline Milliard, Rafal Niemojewski, Ben Borthwick and Jonathan Watkins, The New Curator (London: Laurence King, 2016), 41.
[3] Antena, “A Manifesto for Ultratranslation,” Antena Books (5).
[4] “En vez de correr para escapar de la intraducibilidad, menospreciarla u observarla con recelo, o lamentando la pérdida que representa, experimentamos lo intraducible como una invitación a más inmersión, más cercanía.” Antena, “Un manifiesto para la ultratraducción,” Antena Books (3).
[5] “La intraducibilidad es la raíz de nuestra práctica. Los momentos de intraducibilidad conducen directamente a la intraducción, la subtraducción, la supertraducción, un exceso, la extraducción, una falta, un límite, una excrecencia, una indecencia, la distraducción, la retraducción, la multitraducción, un error, un conflicto. Un entendimiento de la posibilidad en el no entender. Una ultratraducción… Ultra: más allá en el espacio, al otro lado, indicando otro lugar. Ultra: yendo más allá, superando, trascendiendo los límites. Ultra: un grado excesivo o extremo.” Antena, “Un manifiesto para la ultratraducción,” Antena Books (1-2).
[6] Leyla Dunia, “Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro sobre su curaduría para la bienal de São Paulo 2018,” Artishock (June 28, 2017).
[7] Ibid.
[8] Terry Smith, “Biennials: Four Fundamentals, Many Variations,” 2016.
[9] “Dos cuerpos con el espacio negativo de la relación entre sí.” Antena, “A Manifesto for Ultratranslation,” Antena Books (4).
[10] “Nada está perdido en la traducción. Todo era ya perdido siempre, mucho tiempo antes de que llegáramos.” Antena, “A Manifesto for Ultratranslation,” Antena Books (1).