Translanding

‘Translanding’ aspires to be a refugium* for these inquiries by:

• facilitating conversations online and in-person to explore shared-singular experiences (such as living in and being otherwise entangled with monoculture, climate collapse, wildfire zones, and ecological remediation and regeneration) through perspectives including queer trans ecology, decolonial analysis, depth pedagogy, and animist, multispecies and community science

• operating a physical place of practice or ‘rest stop,’ located in Portugal, in the spirit of the caravanserai, where periodic, spontaneous and iterative conversations and relations among the evolving collective can be nourished, recorded, held, mobilized and returned to within the wider body and longer temporalities of translanding inquiries, and where actions and technologies can be moved across places and times**

• exploring what light the languages and perspectives of ‘trans’ can (and do not) shed on approaches to land stewardship, water protection and spiritual, relational, ecological and political repair

• organizing writing experiments on the theme of ‘transl(and)ation,’ which focus on studying the problems and poetics of communicating perception, sensation, experience and meaning across languages, bodies, species, forces, territories and realms

In addition to centering the experiences, proprioceptions and wisdoms of trans-bodied and queer people and other beings, inspired by Cecilia Vicuña’s Palabrarmas methodology, translanding lays with the alchemizing technology of four English concepts and three Portuguese: transform, transmute, transient, transgress, atravessar, transbordar and transpassar.****   

Some questions in the mix at the moment are:

• How do we share intimacy with the land and practice more expansive love and learning across species, places and temporalities?

• What do Earth’s intelligences teach us about modes and ecologies of collective care in different layers and scales?

• How do we learn from ancestors and relatives who may themselves be de-localized, dispersed, disenchanted, migrant and perhaps in conflict and trauma with each other? 

• How are we contributing to and disrupting colonizer and settler violences we have inherited in our human and more-than-human relationships?

• How can queer and trans bodies, and our diverse experiences of the nonbinary world, orient approaches to the defense of life and our sense and stewardship of land (including all lives and relations, our own and each other’s)? 

Notes

* We play with the subtle difference between the words refuge and refugium in English. A refuge is a place that offers shelter or protection from danger or distress, or something to turn to in times of difficulty. Refugia are ‘habitats where elements of biodiversity retreat, persist, and can potentially expand from under changing environmental conditions.’ [read about refugia in biogeography and ecology here]

** Caravanserais were inns located every 30-40 kilometers (a day's journey) along the Silk Road—about 6,400 kilometers connecting China to Europe through Central Asia. From the third to the seventeenth century, these structures facilitated safer travel, trade, and the trans-territorial circulation of news, social ties, knowledge, art, technologies, and cosmologies.

*** The term ‘transl(and)ation’ plays on the ecotone of various concepts: trans-, land, transland, translation, and and. 

**** ‘One day, I saw a word as if it were a vision, and this word named itself palabrarma, which means, in Spanish, a word that is a weapon. But it also means labrar, to work words as you work the land’ (more about Cecilia Vicuña and the palabrarmas project).

Português │ Para ler a versão em português, clique aqui. Atualmente, estamos trabalhando em inglês, mas esperamos oferecer algumas sessões incluindo português no futuro.