Eliana Maestri

Translation as Advocacy: An artistic response to climate action

Drawing on my 2022-2023 project ‘12 Stories for 12 Days of COP27’ funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, this paper reflects on the value of translation as artistic practice and climate advocacy. The questions that I raise are the following: Can the arts shed light on the practice of translation? And, conversely, can translation shed light on artistic practices? The aim is to gain insight into the interlinks between translation and the visual arts and the role that they can play in political engagement and climate advocacy. The case study that I discuss includes the outcome of a project that I have managed and that has involved public engaging activities, events, printmaking workshops and art exhibitions. I specifically reflect on the work that I carried out with a group of printmakers as ‘artists-as-translators’ from the city of Exeter whose brief was to translate visually a collection of stories co-produced by a group of scientists, artists, health professional, climate activists, creative writers and translators. The project, embedded within a wider project run by the University of Exeter in support of COP27 last November, employed eco-translation as a creative response to fictional stories and, more generally, climate action. The paper makes use of a combination of approaches both from Multimodal Studies (Kress 2020; Adami 2020) and Translation Studies (Tymoczko 2000; 1995, Cronin 2017) in an attempt to unveil the humanitarian value of this project and, in particular, the invaluable cross-disciplinary dialogues between climate scientists, translation experts, creative writers and local artists from the city of Exeter. 

Bio:

Dr Eliana Maestri is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies and Director of the Centre for Translating Cultures at the University of Exeter. Inspired by her life as a migrant between languages and cultures, Dr Maestri conducts research into translation as a journey and an opportunity to travel across borders and media boundaries. Dr Maestri is interested in any form of translation and movement of objects and people into new territories and lands of hope, care and respect. She has published extensively on translation, migration, gender and visual culture. Her monograph Translating the Female Self across Cultures appeared in the 2018 John Benjamins Translation Library. Her awards include: a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award to co-organize the 2019 Exeter Translation Festival and a 2022-23 National Lottery Project Grant, Arts Council England, to run the ‘12 Stories for 12 Days of COP27’ project, organise public events and co-curate arts exhibitions. She is also the recipient of a EUOSSIC Erasmus Mundus Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Universities of Sydney and Bath (2011-2012) and a MEEUC Research Fellowship, Monash University, Melbourne (2014). Together with colleagues from KU Leuven and IUAV University of Venice, Maestri is one of the core faculty members of the Venice International University Summer School: Linguistic Landscapes: Using Signs and Symbols to Translate Cities.