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Traduttore – Traditore

Traduttore – Traditore

As a daughter of immigrants I was raised as a “stranger” in my own homeland. Another language was spoken in my home. I felt “different”. I learned variants of a so-called “mother tongue”.
Through the experience of exile is how the stranger needs to learn to speak
“Learning to speak“ would then preserve that distance with strangeness; that separates and binds me to my neighbor in a relationship of “togetherness”
The categories of native and foreign, home and away appear to me reformulated.
“The Other” was born at the moment the Tower of Babel was destroyed, when all different languages were created.

Babel means “confusion”. The “Other” was born when the Tower of Babel was destroyed, when different languages were created, and people had to “translate” his/her thoughts to co-habit the same territory.
Taking note of these concepts, I created an installation made of hand-cut rubber shaping a net of 70 different characters of different languages. There is an interpretation of the bible that there were seventy nations and languages first created in the world. This assumption is based upon the ethnological note, where seventy grandsons of Noah are enumerated, each of whom became the ancestor of a nation.

The visitor is able to walk around and inside the installation.
Printed papers with the story of the tower of Babel in ancient and contemporary languages are displayed on the surrounding walls.

NASA asked Dr Carl Sagan of Cornell University to assemble a greeting to leave in the space, thirty years ago*1. This constant murmur with greetings in 55 different languages, will be heard.

Mirta Kupferminc

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-record/