Joi T Arcand in Canadian Art Feature: Late Arrivals
Canadian Art
FEATURES / AUGUST 28, 2018
Late Arrivals
In contemporary culture, we take for granted that everything is accelerating. But what happens when a book of the moment takes years to be published in your mother tongue?
exerpt of feature by Vincent Bonin (reposted from Canadian Art website)
When I translate myself, there is no longer any French text to read. At some point, it vanishes after I shift to English. Once edited, my sentences will give the impression to the reader that I can “pass” as anglophone, which is always in my view a semblance similar to, and as problematic as, other forms of passing. It remains difficult, however, to place myself firmly as a subject in this “first” tongue, the one in which I seemingly think. Sometimes the friction of slipping from one idiom to another gives me the right distance from that point of origin—the mother tongue—which should always remain contingent. The ambivalence that I present here using a personal voice doesn’t only stem from my own experience within the narrow frame of a given Québécois identity in Canada. For a long time, I have been trying to understand complex linguistic sites (those of Canada and other national configurations) through the transfer of culture—for instance, the reception of literary, philosophical or visual artworks in contexts other than those of their initial readership or audience—which generates both a gain and a loss of meaning. Can these gaps between different moments in the reception of a work, which are sometimes intervals of many years, ultimately give us another sense of time, and a renewed political agency?
“I believe that translation always calls for a future, just by imagining another reader. The fact that these books are most often published with social justice–oriented presses advocates for this possibility of new political agency and activism.”
Artist Joi T. Arcand, who is from the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, presented a neon work entitled ᐁᑳᐏᔭ ᓀᐯᐃᐧᓯ (ekawiya nepewisi) (2017). The piece is part of an ongoing series in which Arcand embeds Cree syllabics into placeholders for commercial and institutional signs, thus interpolating into the symbolic order (capitalism, patriarchy) a language for the most part readable only by the members of her own community. For the Wood Land School project, the work was displayed inside the gallery; in the context of Quebec, it clashed with what was outside—the protectionism behind a langue d’affichage, which prevails since the adoption of Bill 101, obliging businesses in the province to advertise predominantly in French. In Arcand’s practice, access to the meaning of words for many relies on translation. But this intentional shift toward intelligibility can be circumvented as well, thus giving form to the concept of opacity as defined by philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant, which refers to the intrinsic right of an interpellated subject to ignore the demand to represent one’s identity in the face of the other, and thus to perform transparency within a hegemonic structure. In many instances, Glissant states that it is important to accept that some knowledge, whatever form it takes, escapes our grasp in the systems familiar to us. This fact doesn’t preclude entering into relation with someone who speaks about belonging to a culture, while at the same time refusing to communicate in expected ways. An audience of allies must sometimes remain on the thresholds of deciphering and interpretation.
This is an article from our Summer 2018 issue, “Translation.”
Vincent Bonin
Vincent Bonin is a Montreal writer and curator. He is author of the book D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant/Actors, Networks, Theories, published by the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery and Dazibao in 2018.