14 - 15 March 2008
Kunsthalle Exnergasse / WUK / 1090 Vienna

Home is where I understand and where I am understood, wrote Karl Jaspers once. If this home today is our globalized world, then its mother tongue cannot be but a translation, both linguistically and culturally. And yet, what if we want this home to have a political meaning, to be the place of freedom, justice and equality for all of us? Should we form a nation of translation and claim its sovereignty in an independent state? Who translates betrays: mother tongues, borders and, above all, the old political dreams. The betrayers of all the nations will never form a nation of their own. It is time for a new challenge. Is it possible to articulate the emerging trans-national culture of translation in non-cultural terms or, in other words, are we able to translate a trans-national cultural space into a common trans-cultural political action?

Participants:
Boris Buden, Rada Ivekovic', Sandro Mezzadra, Klaus Neundlinger, Stefan Nowotny, Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodriguez, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jon Solomon, Hito Steyerl, Tom Waibel, Michaela Wolf.

The conference will be held in English and in German (simultaneous translation).
Audio streaming: (audio archive will be available from may 2008).

More information on the Conference Program.

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Publications of the conference results:

All conference texts will be published in three languages in the multilingual web journal transversal 06/08: Borders, Nations, Translations 1 and transversal 07/08: Borders, Nations, Translations 2.

Excerpts of the conference texts are published in German in cooperation with the magazine Kulturrisse 02/2008.