I’ve studied and I work with architecture. Deliberately, I intended to push myself away from that (de)structuration, forcing a distance upon me, generating an artificiality that could bear a dislocation of the self. Today, it seems as though such artificiality has betrayed me — which appears pleonastic to me — in the sense that I fear this dislocation hasn’t quite faced reality. My life exists beyond what is here displayed, in these conversations — each and everyone’s life as well, I presume — and, consequently, I must consider this time, this portion of time, as integrated within the whole and not as something which is not free from it. Can we disconnect ourselves from the real? Is translating a condition of the real? If so, can we escape it? Going back, why escape?

I will try to synthesise what is — or, has been — this research’s aim: Articulating how and why translation, as the act of doing it, i.e., as a practise, can be related to education. Opposing what lies on the common knowledge regarding the territory of translation and what I intend to understand about that same territory, I take from Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben —using Paul Ricœur and Walter Benjamin as square one — trying to offer a point of view where translation is of utmost importance to the learning process. 

Translation is here understood as an action itself, as a concept that defines a particular motion: one of drifting, as it is linked to teaching and to learning within the specificity of the artistic practise.

Like a constant construction of change, translation as a metaphor for an artistic and aporetic thinking is used so as to establish a dialectic relation with what may lie beneath the field of education. We root (this) translation in education’s grounds, taking advantage of the stemming (im)possibilities that arise from that (those) displacement(s). 

This type of thought is intended to lead the crystallised and standardised discourses — the ones that establish the places and the figures of education within the artistic field — to a critical point. For that effect, the paradox in the educational relationship — be it for the student or the teacher in their common relationship — is explored, instigating the opening of a state of suspension in the light of these pre-established identities and, simultaneously, a leap towards the not known.

This written piece is, just as how I’d like to compose translation, a constant construction.

*Amputechture is the title of a studio album by The Mars Volta. It is a portmanteau word combining amputation, technology and architecture. Cedric Bixler-Zavala, responsible for the lyrics and the vocal melodies, has mentioned this album had a more open and unpredictable process, as it stemmed from single words or impulses, being written and recorded as it was being played and rehearsed.

I will try to stand in the shoulders of the references brought up. Namely Derrida’s and Barthes' way of writing is a constant working tool so as to dig deeper within the words, using questions to anchor certain points or ideas so as to be picked up later, promoting a pendulum within the writing, therefore within the thought, rather than a “train of thought”. I want the writing itself to be a registry of questioning.

Even though I intend to discuss the importance of the act of translation towards the educational process, I'm not looking for a particular finding. This conference, I believe, will be a vehicle for me to expose the work I have been and will be developing in my Doctoral Thesis, so what I expect is an open discussion about the subject and that is what ultimately interests me. I’m eager to provide, and that is a purpose which I will attempt to attain, a space, a situation —an event, if you will— for discussion and the outcome of this outcome may help me, and others, question the work itself and function as a lever to it.

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