Can translation work as a way to counter boundaries and reimagine histories? Writer and translator Khashayar Naderehvandi and philosopher Lucie Mercier reflect on translation as a practice and as a theoretical prism.

If the history of culture and thought in Europe operates by way of establishing boundaries, how can certain legacies, ancestries, and historical trajectories be re-membered in and through the practices of (literary) translation and poetry? What does translation as witnessing mean?

Khashayar Naderehvandi is a poet, critic and prose writer based in Sweden. His writing has explored various fundamental literary notions, such as narrativity, subjectivity, migration, and memory. He has published several books, and is regularly commissioned by the Swedish National Radio as a critic. He is currently a doctoral researcher in Artistic Practices, with focus on literary composition, at Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg.

Lucie Kim-Chi Mercier is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University. She wrote her PhD thesis (2015) on the concept and philosophies of translation, at the intersection of Benjamin’s philosophy of language, Serres’s epistemology of science and the reconfiguration of critique in postcolonial times. She currently works on the transformation of critique and the ‘geopolitics of philosophy’ in the postcolonial era. She has published in the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, Theory, Culture and Society and is an editorial member of Radical Philosophy.

This event is part of the public programme accompanying the exhibition When Legacies Become Debts, curated by Azar Mahmoudian.

FREE

Please note, seats for this event are limited and are allocated on a first come first served basis.