Organised by Anna Luhn (Freie Universität Berlin/EXC 2020), Research Area 4: »Literary Currencies«.

For this two-day research and development workshop, Yael Ort-Dinoor (designer, educator, farmer) and Sophie Seita (EXC 2020 Dorothea Schlegel Artist in Residence) invite other artists, writers, thinkers, and practitioners, into their experimental collaborative project around alternative models for art education and interdisciplinary practice in precarious times. They are currently developing ›Translating Borders‹ as a one-week intensive learning and making space to be held in summer 2023, in collaboration with Rupert (a public art institution and alternative education programme in Vilnius, Lithuania) for and with international artists, writers, musicians, designers, curious about other ways of thinking about how their practice (be it artistic or non-artistic or something in between) can offer forms of empowerment. Since the pandemic, the artists have been drawn to transferential and nomadic ways of thinking and making. Rethinking art institutions, expanding how and where learning takes place, as well as on who has access to communal knowledge, Translating Borders will offer an inter-disciplinary experience at the intersection of writing, design, performance, publishing, and activism. The retreat will seek to activate ideas of translation and borders through rhizomatic ways of connecting somatic, written, and visual practices.

In both this R&D workshop at FU Berlin and the longer one-week retreat next summer, participants explore methods of translation as movement across borders and media to reflect on issues of place, migration, and belonging. 

The project borrows from non-art practices, discourses, and rituals (gardening, farming, medicinal histories, migration stories, environmental care); and introduces artistic interventions to investigate and reimagine artistic practice through, for example, walking, mapping, journaling, DIY publishing, and dance. Through collective conversations, participants will create an engaged knowledge community rooted in cross-cultural and embodied making, sharing, and listening.