Public Program: Lexicon of Stealing ことばを盗む
︎ Wednesday July 30 | 17:30-19:00
︎ お茶ナビゲート | Ocha Navigate
B1, Ochanomizu Solacity, 4-6, Kanda Surugadai, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, 1010062
RSVP: LINK HERE
Is stealing always stealing?
In Korean, you can 서리 a watermelon from a farmer’s field,
and in Slovenian, you can rabutaš a cherry from a neighbour’s tree.
Can we steal something by translating it?
We take a word, a sound, a meaning, and scrap it into something new.
Join us for an interactive workshop exploring offering and losing, taking and making
– as we collectively steal and scrap the words we hold dear.
In Korean, you can 서리 a watermelon from a farmer’s field,
and in Slovenian, you can rabutaš a cherry from a neighbour’s tree.
Can we steal something by translating it?
We take a word, a sound, a meaning, and scrap it into something new.
Join us for an interactive workshop exploring offering and losing, taking and making
– as we collectively steal and scrap the words we hold dear.
Designed and led by:
Špela Drnovšek Zorko is a Project Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Intercultural Studies, Kobe University, and Co-Vice Director of the Kobe Migration Research Center. After obtaining her PhD in anthropology at SOAS University of London she held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Warwick and Waseda University, researching historical memory and racialized postsocialist and postcolonial encounters through the lens of “Eastern European” migrant narratives. Her present work centres on questions of migration, translation, and “entangled Easts” as methodology.
leo je-eon lee fidgets with words. He makes material forms in order to touch language. By shaping, taking apart, putting together, and rearranging objects, he creates a system with its own logic. This system resembles the structure of language. lee steals language. Through “shitty translation,” he turns shared language and twists it into something specific and personal. This deliberate mistranslation is a method for building his own domain within the universal. lee obsesses over language. He recalls words that could have been forgotten and chews on them again and again. A compulsive repetition of words and actions becomes a form of devotion, a slow and persistent practice that often defines his process.