Research project 'gränsen' explores translation through a 7-day collective residency at EMS next week

You tell me a tale, and I will listen. The story is yours to voice, but it dies the moment it slips your lips. I will adore it, and I will betray it. Your language, my language, and between the two a path of ravishment. Always in-between is the boundary, always the demarcation between your body and mine; your language and me; your mouth and my ear; your hello and my good bye.

On Monday, October 30th, Wildow's research project on translation and language as artistic material starts with a collective residency at EMS (Elektronmusikstudion). Recently Wildow invited a group of Egyptian and Swedish multilingual practitioners, all working to some degree within and with their own mother tongues; to enter a relation of some kind with her. Being drawn to interspaces within language, where words reach their own limitations, Wildow’s invitation was one concerned with the act of translation. When not speaking each other's mother tongues, when language itself performs the very border of comprehension, what kind of disparate translations of each other’s work can we generate? Can we allow for our works to go errant, get lost, die, and be reborn in an one another’s mouths? Can something utterly other be set in motion in a gap of hybridized languages?

The six artists - Nadah El Shazly, Mohammed A. Gawad, Adham Hafez, Alva Willemark, Erik Malmsten and Hanna Wildow - are gathering to collectively construct a realm of trans-boundary practices; geographical movements as well as genre-crossing art works. Together, in a week-long residency in Stockholm next week followed by a second residency in Cairo in February 2018, they inquire about borders and boundaries, what these mean across languages, practises, artforms and geographies. As unknown outcomes, interdisciplinary presentations will take place in Stockholm and in Cairo.

gränsen is co-produced by Sarah El Miniawy, a Stockholm based music manager from Cairo, and made possible through the support of The Swedish Arts Grants Committee (Konstnärsnämnden) for Hanna Wildow. With special thanks to EMS for their generous week-long hosting of the group.