A walk 5/7
di Salvatore Lacagnina
Translation has long been understood as the simple transmission from one language to another, a literary matter for specialists and writers. Yet, during the Counter-Reformation, the circulation of the Bible and the celebration of mass in Europe were restricted to Latin and to texts sanctioned by ecclesiastical authority. Could the devil be in the details of translation?
More recently, translation has come to be understood as a foundational element in the construction of identity itself. The Japanese scholar Naoto Sakai describes identity not as a fixed form of self-representation, but as a process of “co-figuration”: something shaped dialogically through the ways others represent us, and through the shifting relations of power embedded in those representations.
The second Japanese embassy to Europe was received in Rome by Pope Paul V under the patronage of Cardinal Scipione Borghese. Around this time, Archita Ricci, the painter responsible for The Banquet of the Gods on the ceiling of the Loggia dei Vini, is believed to have painted, in 1618, Two Full-Length Portraits of the Japanese Ambassadors.
Languages translate languages, cultures translate cultures. Images, too, can be translated into words, just as words and images can dissolve into music. Music remains one of the most mysterious human experiences, despite its mathematical structure. With his characteristic irony, Jimmie Durham once claimed to hate music because he could never control what it did to his body, which would suddenly start moving at the sound of even the most banal song. He also mocked scientific claims suggesting that trees love Mozart, apologizing instead for the songs of his Cherokee ancestors.
Saâdane Afif
Live in LAVINIA
Visual art and music have long been translated obsessively into words. First by historians, later by critics. Language itself follows musical structures, evokes images, brushes against things without ever fully grasping them. Throughout the twentieth century, words became increasingly central within visual art. At a certain point, Duchamp chose silence and chess, or at least allowed us to believe he did.
For more than twenty years, Saâdane Afif has commissioned song lyrics from artists, critics, curators, friends, and collaborators, asking them to write in response to one of his works. These texts are then interpreted musically by different composers: translations of translations. Sometimes they are performed live alongside the artworks; at other times they circulate independently in musical contexts, before audiences unfamiliar with the works that generated them.
For the duration of the performance Live in LAVINIA, the Loggia will become, two days a week, a rehearsal space where Federico Bisozzi and Simone Alessandrini will compose music for ten texts written by ten different authors (Clara Meister, Deo Katunga, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Giulia Pollicita, Ina Blom, Jeanna Criscitiello, Marc Knauer, Nicolas Bourriaud, Shatha Afify and Ugnė Uma) in response to Live, an ever-evolving presentation gathering posters from cultural events, which the artist uses as ready-mades and transforms into a narrative of a city’s cultural life. The work will remain on view at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, for the entire duration of the performance at LAVINIA. During these sessions, the Loggia will be experienced through sound: through the fragility of artistic and musical creation, through rehearsals, repetitions, hesitations, interruptions, and returns. Space translated into music translating words translating a visual artwork. Not simply a way of destabilizing authorship, but of questioning the very conditions through which art is experienced: what constitutes an exhibition, what defines an aesthetic encounter, what separates artwork, performance, rehearsal and process.
A radical gesture operating through the evocative force of music, inhabiting the unstable space between objects, identities, expectations and protocols, exposing their cultural construction while unsettling the habits we too easily mistake for truths.
Saâdane Afif (Vendôme, 1970) lives and works in Berlin. Saâdane Afif’s installations, objects, concerts, and performances engage with works and events drawn from the histories of art, music, and poetry. His practice is defined by radical variability – indeed, a fluid passage – across media, disciplines, inspirations, and methods. Afif’s practice draws on a rich network of collaborators from diverse fields, whose expertise and style is absorbed, rearticulated, and set into resonance with his oeuvre, through collaborative projects that challenge the very notion of the singular artwork and the figure of the individual creator.
He was the artistic director of the 4th edition of the Bergen Assembly triennial: Yasmine and the Seven Faces of the Heptahedron (2022). Together with Yasmine d’O., he is the founder of Side Magazine. The artist’s works have been included in major international festivals, biennials, and exhibitions, among them the 15th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2024); the 10th Taipei Biennial, Taipei (2016); the 56th Venice
Biennale, Venice (2015); the 5th Marrakech Biennale, Marrakech (2014); La Triennale de Vendôme, Vendôme (2015); the 8th Berlin Biennale, Berlin (2014); the 11th Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah (2013); the 9th Lyon Biennale, Lyon (2007), and the 1st Moscow Biennale, Moscow (2005).
Performance
Federico Bisozzi is a Rome-based composer and multi-instrumentalist working across film, sound design, and musical arrangement. His practice spans feature films, international documentaries, and independent productions.
Simone Alessandrini is one of the leading figures of a new generation of Italian jazz musicians. A saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist, his practice moves between contemporary jazz, film music, and pop productions.
Rosaria Angotti, a soprano and eclectic musician, is fascinated by the crossover between contemporary music and folk traditions.
Still on view: Ross Birrell & David Harding, Enzo Cucchi, Piero Golia, Gianni Politi, Monika Sosnowska
Still on view: Ross Birrell & David Harding, Enzo Cucchi, Piero Golia, Johanna Grawunder, Gianni Politi
Still on view: Ross Birrell & David Harding,
Enzo Cucchi, Piero Golia, Johanna Grawunder,
Gianni Politi, Monika Sosnowska
Still on view: Ross Birrell & David Harding,
Enzo Cucchi, Ruth Ewan, Piero Golia,
Gianni Politi, Monika Sosnowska