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 — my 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.

Here, I intend to open up these closed thoughts on denaturalising certain concepts by reflecting upon the creative process, i.e., the moment of creation. By this, I’d like to highlight how the moment is one which stretches across time. This moment of drifting is then punctuated by fragments of reality —epiphanies— which penetrate the self, while making evident how external they are to it. These moments which fraction the self, carry with them the opportunity for agency: it’s this possibility that must not be ignored.

This penetration (or these penetrations) may only happen so if a risk is taken. For only by acknowledging one’s limits may one explore whatever’s inside or outside them. If this is true, then what does it mean to pose a question on education at an era of risk? I would like to follow this subject, using the above-mentioned denaturalising approach to it, questioning what kind of problem does the risk represent in education, one to be avoided, or one of necessity. 

For the sake of practicability, I will list the main issues to be approached:

0. what I believe is vital to what is usually called the ‘creative process’: the need for resisting the structures which hold you from being free;

1. the form of potentiality I wish to consider as relevant in this context: to deprive oneself;

2. how can the self recognise and act upon reality;

3. knowing what to expect and accepting the ignorance towards what’s yet to come;

4. on adventure and experience;

5. epiphanies and the fragility of language;

6. translation and the need for it;

7. inventing and practise;

8. moving away from a binary logic, i.e., a hegemony;

9. the possibility of education through risk.

10. the academy as the place for taking risks.

In sum, I intend to discuss about a constructed path that reveals a propensity for discontinuity before the established discourses. A translation’s translation, and so on, a constant search for Babel, not the tower, but the well, never installing itself as the truth, always questioning the established power and the one it might establish. 

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. Nevertheless, I've grown quite weary of the discourses around risks and around the avoidance of them. Like most things in a global world, the sound either black or white. It doesn't seem exist space for gray areas. I would like to retrieve some of them, acknowledging the existence of risks and the necessity for them.

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