The Council

BY ana gabriela jiménez and maría albornoz                  

Aprender a hablar es aprender a traducir; cuando el niño pregunta a su madre por el significado de esta o aquella palabra, lo que realmente pide es que traduzca a su lenguaje el término desconocido. La traducción dentro de una lengua no es, en este sentido, esencialmente distinta a la traducción entre dos lenguas, y la historia de todos los pueblos repite la experiencia infantil: incluso la tribu más aislada tiene que enfrentarse, en un momento o en otro, al lenguaje de un pueblo extraño.

When we learn to speak we are learning to translate; the child who asks his mother the meaning of a word is really asking her to translate the unfamiliar term into the simple words he already knows. In this sense translation within the same language is not essentially different from translation between two tongues, and the histories of all peoples parallel the child’s experience. Even the most isolated tribe, sooner or later, comes into contact with other people who speak a foreign language.(1) — Octavio Paz, Theories of Translation.
-----

In January 2020 we at The Clay Studio invited members of South Kensington’s vibrant cultural community to add their voices to the planning and design process of Making Place Matter. Fifteen people honored us by joining the Exhibition Council. This created a new collaborative approach between our communities and our organization to interpret the artists’ work and reflect these ideas to audiences.

Over the last two years, we developed a relationship that grew strong and insightful. At the beginning, challenged by the pandemic, our gathering moved virtually. To connect us, we delivered clay activity kits to each council member’s household. Crafting clay together became fundamental to building physical bridges within
our Zoom-based encounters. We used hands-on activities as a way to make these virtual gatherings meaningful and productive. Working with clay focuses the mind and allows people to feel relaxed and open to conversations. Similar to the intimacy created when sharing a meal, we exchanged our thoughts around the artwork and ideas in Making Place Matter.

During our early gatherings, we dove into discussions about how community and place are reflected in words and translation as we discussed, what “Making Place Matter” could mean in Spanish and how to convey it to visitors. “I teach English and Spanish, and [language is] such a big marker of who we are as people,” teacher Meliza Reynoso, Board Member of Norris Square Neighborhood Project noted, point- ing to Spanish’s roots in the Arabic language: “...one of the artists speaks Arabic, and we have a huge Palestinian community and Puerto Rican and Dominican and Mexican in this neighborhood.” Language offers a view of the world, and Reynoso saw the power of bringing Spanish and Arabic—languages of our communities—together.

With our hands on clay while we spoke, we discussed synonyms, associations, inter- pretations, and inspirations in our various mother tongues and adopted languages. While working on Making Place Matter’s Spanish title, Formar Tierra y Lugar, we realized rather than translating, we should create distinct titles that had the same meaning, but did not necessarily contain the exact same words. Arabic translator, Shimaa Eid applied the same thinking, creating what she called a transcreation for the Arabic title (Lil Makani Athar) which means “for place, there’s an impact, influence, imprint, value.”

At another insightful Council meeting, Ah-Young Kim, manager of school visits at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, shared her knowledge of slow looking, the art of learning through observation. This educational strategy engages viewers in a way that prolongs their experience by slowing down to allow space for learning and reflection. During our meeting, Kim helped us to apply this technique. Spending time with Henry Ossawa Tanner’s painting The Annunciation (1898) we described what we saw, sharing our observations and perspectives, and how they related to us personally.

Keeping our practice of engaging in hands-on activities, during the next several Council sessions, we worked with the design firm Tiny WPA. Co-founder Alex Gilliam led the Council through the firm’s community-led design process. Collectively we designed, prototyped, and built the furniture that is now in the gallery with Making Place Matter.

The process began by discussing how design concepts could influence how the audience experienced the art, and the Council collaboratively defined the needs of the exhibition. In the summer of 2021, our first in-person meeting, Gilliam led the Council and staff in a day-long session where council members designed prototype ideas in cardboard. These led to the final designs. Once in hand, Council members and staff gathered in the Tiny WPA woodshop. There, we worked together to build a first draft of the bench, table, and trays for the gallery that will be used for the ex- hibition. It was an amazing experience to spend time with so many council members completing the final touches on the gallery furniture.

We found that our building session was, in a way, a similar exercise to our earlier translations of the Spanish and Arabic titles. Here, instead of words, we were using wood planes, bandsaws, clamps, vises, and glue through a physical and crafted process that transformed our ideas into something tangible. Something that we believed reflected the experience we wish to offer to the public in the gallery. Our intentions got a new life in the language of the furniture we built.

Understanding how to make a place matter is an ongoing collective endeavor. During the final Council meeting, we used brushes instead of clay in our hands and painted hexagon-shaped tiles inspired by the work of Ibrahim Said. This activity loosened our thoughts and relaxed our minds as we returned to words, while the Council developed themes for the artwork’s labels. Like translation, every word holds a number of meanings. This book’s readers and the exhibition’s visitors will combine our words with theirs, to make their own phrases in their spoken and physi- cal languages. They will keep the conversation going.

Craft unites hand and mind. In a little over two years and a total of eight meetings with the Council, we developed meaningful relationships. We sought to explore and build with our hands, while our dialogue around the exhibition grew. In this way, we as staff and Council invite audiences to experience Making Place Matter and add their voices to Said, Velarde, and Hatch’s artwork.

(1) Octavio Paz, ‘Translation: Literature and Letters’. Translated by Irene del Corral. Theories of Translation, edited by R. Schulte and J. Biguenet, University of Chicago Press, 1992: 152.