!Cuidado! Illegal Alien Xing! Work in process. Digital image using Abode Illustrator.
“For my senior project I spent three credits working on and in translations. Most of this work involved translating Ranjana Khanna’s article “Signatures of the Impossible,” from the English original into Portuguese. The article drew my attention during the winter term of 2020 while taking a class called ‘Derrida and Questions of Difference’ due to its insistence on thinking about, and critically re-thinking, the importance of feminism.
In some ways, the challenge of translating is one of letting the text nag you. To go back to a text attempting to understand it through rewriting it, word by word, in a different language, is to insist on the text. Such insistence through the process of translation made me carefully consider and understand what the author tried to convey while writing in English. Translating also made me draw attention to the limitations of my own understanding of the text as well as my limited ability to think about Khanna’s concepts in Portuguese, a language that I am no longer used to using. This was a challenge of re-writing a familiar text within a less familiar context, that is to say, writing in Portuguese in an academic language. I really enjoyed this process of learning through reading, writing, and in translating, reconsidering every word. It was challenging while very satisfying in terms of having a tangible product: the translated text. From this exploration of meaning via different languages I moved to a smaller part of my senior project which was a painting I made called ¡Cuidado! Illegal Alien Xing!. During this part of my project, I continued to think about language and how to produce meaning, but this time through a different medium: acrylic on canvas.”
Senior project director: Netta van Vliet
Explorationon US/Mexico map. Acrylic on canvas board 9x12 inches.
