Gaia Del Negro and Silvia Luraschi

A métissage with words and images about materiality, embodiment and porosity in experiential translation

In this presentation we will introduce a feminist writing practice called métissage (Bishop et al., 2019) that we used to reflect about the views of three women about doing translation in different situations: performative, poetic, and didactic. All the three women somehow have a relationship with a research project on Experiential Translation we conducted in Italy in 2021-2022, Ospitare/Hosting others (Del Negro, Luraschi, Delorenzi & El Saadany, 2022), translating actively and collectively with a group of adult educators an ‘invisible’ performance and two poems in Italian from the performance. Our métissage mixes two codes (words and images) selected through a “filter” of three guiding ideas: materiality, embodiment and porosity, that for us encompass dimensions of body, environment and context in translation. Our translation process can be seens as a creative response to a question (“what is the stuff translation is made of?”). By way of recomposing the words of these three women with some photos taken during the research activity, we aim to illuminate how playing with creative languages is a possibility to encounter the others and our-selves deeply. This is not a linear analytic process of reflection but expresses the generativity of language in its indeterminacy and confusion: translation always starts by disorienting us and finds a point of arrival that leaves more questions open.

 

Bios:

Gaia Del Negro, PhD, is a researcher in Adult Education and teacher of Italian as a
second and foreign language. She works as evaluator of social projects and trainer in
community welfare and gender equality with a participatory practice-based approach in
Milan. She collaborates with the University of Milano Bicocca and with the Sunkhronos
Institute in Geneva. She is involved in the Life History and Biography Network of ESREA -
European Society for Research on the Education of Adults, in the international group of
feminist scholars and activists Gender Justice, Creative Pedagogies and Art-based
Research coordinated by the University of Victoria, Canada, and in the Experiential
Translation Network: Meaning Making Across Languages and the Arts.

Silvia Luraschi, PhD, is a pedagogist, Feldenkrais method practitioner, counsellor, and
researcher in Adult Education. She works as a coordinator of social service in Milan, and
she is collaborating with Milano Bicocca University. Her research interests include
embodied narratives, aesthetic practices, and walking methodologies. She is involved in
the Life History and Biography Network of ESREA - European Society for Research on the
Education of Adults, and in the international group of feminist scholars and activists
Gender Justice, Creative Pedagogies and Art-based Research coordinated by the
University of Victoria, Canada. She is involved in Experiential Translation Network:
Meaning Making Across Languages and the Arts.