Experiential Translation Online Seminar: Talks by Danica Maier and Emily Butler

Please join us for the next meeting of the Experiential Translation Online Seminar for talks by Danica Maier on Shifting Perspectives: Applying Intersemiotic Translation to Enable Aspect Seeing through Unrepeating-repeats in a Contemporary Art Practice and Emily Butler on Towards a curatorial translation zone.

 The seminar is free and open to all. 

More about the ETOS

Abstracts

Shifting Perspectives: Applying Intersemiotic Translation to Enable Aspect Seeing through Unrepeating-repeats in a Contemporary Art Practice
Danica Maier, Nottingham Trent University

This presentation explores how hand-drawn repetition, inspired by historical textiles and transformed through intersemiotic translation, fosters embodied audience engagement. Grounded in a recently completed PhD by Creative Works (2025), the research spans six bodies of artwork (2014-23) that reimagine textile processes by bridging drawing, writing, and site-specific practice.
Within the practice-research textiles function as active agents in translation, expanding their role beyond materiality into dynamic, interdisciplinary dialogues. Drawing on Roman Jakobson’s (1959) concept of intersemiotic translation and contemporary explorations by Madeleine Campbell and Ricarda Vidal (2019) and Lee (2022), this research explores how textile processes are translated into drawn textual forms. While textiles have long been studied in cultural contexts, their capacity as catalysts for translation remains underexamined. A further aspect is the “unrepeating-repeat”: iterative variation that disrupts repetition to provoke perceptual shifts. This technique enables aspect seeing, (Wittgenstein 1953/2010), inviting viewers to encounter moments of discovery where the familiar transforms, revealing multiple perspectives.
This presentation outlines how intersemiotic translation, aspect seeing, and the unrepeating-repeat form a cohesive and unique framework for artistic creation. The unrepeating-repeat fosters attentive exploration; aspect seeing activates shifts in perception; and intersemiotic translation expands meaning across modes. This integrated approach transforms the audience’s experience into an active, participatory process, offering a novel understanding of how artistic frameworks can foster embodied discovery.

Towards a curatorial translation zone
Emily Butler, Reading University

Emily Butler presents a summary of her article “Towards a curatorial translation zone”. In it, she argues that in a globalizing world, the act of translation is potentially everywhere (Bassnett 2014; Blumczynski 2016, in Vidal 2022). It involves a creative process of transfer, interpretation, and transformation across sign systems, cultures, and worldviews – an act with profound socio-political implications. Within the visual arts field, it describes the practice of artists and curators who work increasingly internationally as ‘material-semiotic actors’ (Haraway 1988: 595), engaged in renegotiating semiotic and cultural frameworks while questioning the socio-political status quo. Yet, what are the limits of translation? What is lost or gained in this “necessary but impossible” act (Spivak 2022: 69)? Who translates in ‘power-differentiated’ contexts (Haraway 1988: 579-80)? This article outlines how artists and curators explore the possibilities and limits of translation within contemporary art to put forward the poetics of the untranslatable (Cassin 2014; Glissant 1990). It develops the concept of (mis)translation and positions the curatorial space as a translation zone (Apter 2006) – a dynamic, impermanent site of semiotic and cultural renegotiation, where hybrid languages, new forms, knowledges and relations can emerge (Bhabha 1994). In doing so, it embraces a ‘kaleidoscopic totality’ of world views (Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant 1990).