If You’re in Marrakech: Translating in/Justice

If you’ll be in Marrakech on the 24th and 25th of this month, Dar al-Ma’mûn‘s Translating in/Justice is free. If you’re not, you could always make it a resolution (’tis the season) to think more about the connections between justice and translation:

Translating in/Justice is the second in a series of three symposia on “Artistic Justice: Positions on the Place of Justice in Art.” It’s set to take place in Marrakech and is curated by Dar al-Ma’mûn co-director Omar Berrada.

According to organizers:

Translating in/Justice seeks to elucidate the links between justice and translation, between transnational justice and translational justice.

Translation is, by nature, linked to ideas of justice, of being just or faithful to a text. The translator’s ethical burden is a constant negotiation between the spirit and the letter of a text, between respectful literalness and naturalizing ethnocentrism. And it is always met with a value judgment: Traduttore traditore as the Italian saying goes.

Conversely, in the French language, prosecution has to do with translation: to bring to justice is traduire en justice, i.e. to translate in(to) justice. To do justice, therefore, is to accomplish a successful act of translation.

The symposium open up this translation/justice nexus thanks to contributions from artists and writers with a diverse array of practices and disciplines: philosophy, architecture, video, performance. In so doing, it will focus on how artists and thinkers signal a crisis in this process of translational justice, i.e. on the instances where the translation goes wrong, or fails to happen.

Speakers include:

Haig Aivazian artist, writer, and curator (Lebanon)

Kamal Aljafari artist and filmmaker (Palestine)

Emily Apter professor of comparative literature at New York University (USA)

Rana Hamadeh performance and visual artist (Lebanon / The Netherlands)

Mohamed Sghir Janjar anthropologist, director of the Fondation du Roi Abdul Aziz in Casablanca (Morocco)

Abdelfattah Kilito writer and literary scholar, professor emeritus at Mohamed V University in Rabat (Morocco)

Declan Long art critic and co-director of MA Art in the Contemporary World at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin (Ireland)

Abdelhay Moudden political scientist, professor at Mohamed V University in Rabat (Morocco)

Marie Muracciole art critic, curator, and professor at Ecole des beaux-arts de Bordeaux (France)

Aislinn O’Donnell philosopher, professor of education at Mary Immaculate College, UL in Limerick (Ireland)