EMBODYING | translating the past
TRANSLATING THE PAST
To reach for the past, a translation must occur. The past cannot be simply conjoured and brought forth into reality. Translation requires a leap-offaith. Translation requires something to be lost. The following passage from Alberto Perez-Gomez's Timely Meditations served as an inspiration for this phase of this research. Because of its significance and the clarity of its prose, it is quoted in long form: "Such a discovery can be associated at different levels with the identification of a poetic event (always a personal encounter capable of "changing one's life") and its architectural interpretation, i.e., an act of "translation" of all kinds of poetic artefacts and historical documents, ranging from paintings or texts, to drawings, models or buildings. Translation, of course in not merely transcription. The understanding of our making, here and now, as a historical phenomenon, is our only possibility for a genuine symbolic intentionality, leading in fact to the rejection of historicism and nostalgic revivals as false forms of cultural continuity...Embodied making, involving a situated mind in a body, its flesh, pleasure and pain, searching for an order rooted in history, perception, and materiality, is the opposite of the construction of an object or building through the implementation of conceptual, methodological tools, and formalist or technological processes. The product might represent a technique in the first instance, implemented in the project as a deliberate act of discovery, but personal
37. Alberto Perez-Gomez. 2016. Timely Meditations: Selected Essays on Architecture. Vol. 2. 2 vols. Montreal: Rightangle International. 50.
techniques guided by historical and cultural insight have a much better chance to resonate with socially relevant meanings." 37 Gomez words serve as an open call for an embodied maker to inhabit spaces of cultural and historical importance and translate their meanings through material. Inspired by this call to action, an exercise of translation from written word to spatial fragment was formed. (see figure 10). These mediums of communication, which related syntatically, require many passes of translation in between them (see pages 128-131). In this manner, a translated history is never direct. It is given the space and time to wander, to transform, and to blossom. This is a sequence of translation:
From historical artifacts (language), to the embodied maker (translator), to material language (meaningful symbols), that speaks through phenomelogical mediums (senses), that creates a poetic event (commemoration).
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