Emma Bolland is an artist and writer employing experimental approaches to an expanded understanding of translation—between languages and language codes, and between voice, ear, image, surface, and page. They are interested in silence, silencing, and the wider politics of communication.  Recent artworks include an experimental ‘audio guide’ for the exhibition imPerfekt at Mewo Künsthalle in Germany and their forthcoming monograph Instructions from Light is published by JOANpublishing later this year.

Translation as a metaphor is a process of de-sedimentation, an unfixing and renewing of language—of speaking and listening. Bhanu Kapil writes that she ‘was interested in vibration. I was interested in what happens when you don’t say anything at all’. My provocation will explore this metaphorical ‘space of vibration’ that I understand as silence. With reference to my forthcoming work Instructions from Light in which a narrator struggles to translate Louise Delluc’s silent era screenplay Le Silence (1920), I will examine the usefulness of struggling: the static (in the sense of radio) space of practice