There My Thoughts Unfold: A Search For Embodied Meaning in Text, Performance, and Video

Abstract

There My Thoughts Unfold focuses on issues of communication, language, and translation. In this installation, I question the extent to which translation can or cannot serve as a path to understanding the complex roles of language in expressing embodied experience. Informed by my personal experiences with language both written and verbal, native and foreign, as well as by my scholarly research, I explore whether language can be considered a medium for humans to understand each other, as well as for imagining the body as connected to that understanding. Identity, which is perceived through language and the body, plays a subtle but important role in my installation in relation to translation. Through written words, sound, and images, I deconstruct conceptual and physical aspects of communication in order to emphasize language's fundamental state of flux, aiming to show that translation happens in the mind as well as the body and verbal communication.