29.10.23, 00:00 – 29.10.23, 00:00
Cuando los subalternos entran en el museo: desobediencia epistémica y crítica institucional. Paul Preciado undertranslation / WDKA Rotterdam
This text by Paul Preciado was undertranslated by the second year students of deFine Art department from the Willem de Kooning Academy as part of a theory class.
It is one of those texts that, to our best knowledge, only exists in spanish. We undertranslated this text because it critiques the institution of the museum from a position that questions its neutrality: it is an institutions that rather that representing and securing “produces performatively” from collective fiction that we call history, it produces that nation, the public.
We all rearranged the classroom tables to draw a square. In order to situate ourselves and allow for lateral thinking to start flowing we began by playing STOP. It is a word game were you have to find a series of words starting with the same letter (which keeps changing on each round) on different categories agreed by the participants: color, feeling, place, etc. Traditionally you play with others in the same language, but in this version of the game you could use any language you know. A multilaingüistic stop.
The text was then introduced and split between the participants, a page per each one. Some translated in silence, others relating to those who were before and after, or even jumping to other places in the text. We took between 45 minutes and one hour to finish. We closed the session by making a reading of the text, from beginning to end. We listened to text in many voices and many approaches, but in the end finished with a feeling of collective understanding that is difficult to measure, but is felt.
