Translation Games is a practice-based research project led by Ricarda Vidal in collaboration with changing partners including artists, curators, poets, translators, researchers and students as well as cultural organisations and schools (e.g. Poetry Library, Southbank Centre; British Library; Free Word Centre; local libraries and galleries; schools in London and Hereford).
Translation Games explores the theory and practice of translation between languages and media via public workshops, events and (often interactive) exhibitions.
Since the project started in 2013 with support from Culture at King’s, we have translated from poetry to scent, film, performance and textile design; from film to installation art; from sound art to dance; between various forms of graphic art as well as between an array of languages.
Students have participated as translators, as artists, writers and performers as well as assistant curators and researchers. Events happen at various times throughout the year.
[Images: (Left) Participants gather round 'text-to-textile' translations at "Fabrication", a Translation Games workshop at the 2015 AHRI Festival, photograph by David Trett; (Right) Participants at a June 2018 workshop at Whitstable Library as part of the Talking Transformations "Home on the Move" project, led by Ricarda Vidal and Manuela Perteghella.]
During March 2018, Moving Hearts, an arts based socially engaged research project, led 21 workshops with Londoners at community centres across the capital to make 1000 human hearts from clay to explore thoughts and feelings on migration and belonging. The living archive of stories shaped the hearts participants made. The fired clay hearts were then wrapped in white shrouds and carried in a procession from King’s College, London to the Museum of Migration at the Workshop on Saturday 24 March.
There the hearts were formed into a spiral installation: museum visitors could walk the spiral, unwrap a heart and write on the shrouds their own thoughts and feelings on migration and belonging. In June 2018 some of the heart-makers came to King’s to help sort the shrouds in terms of topic as part of the research process and were invited to tell in more detail their own stories of migration and belonging.
Moving Hearts is funded by the Alliance Plus Seed Fund and is a collaboration between Prof Anna Reading, Australian artist Penny Ryan, and Dr James Bjork, also from King’s.
[Image: Participants at Moving Hearts at the Migration Museum in Lambeth, March 2018.]
Moving Hearts: Exploring the Right to Belong