The Art of Cultural Exchange: Translation and Transformation between the UK and Brazil 2014-16

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Cultural exchange is an important means by which nations and communities translate themselves and are in turn translated by others. This research proposes an investigation into cultural exchange as an act of translation. It will focus on the transformations sought through the exchange of artists, artistic production and artistic methodologies. With the support of British Council and Arts Council England, THE ART OF CULTURAL EXCHANGE forges a research collaboration between QMUL and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro that will map the current terrain of Anglo-Brazilian cultural exchanges. With a particular focus on UK exchanges with arts organizations emerging from Rio de Janeiro's peripheral urban territories, the research will extend analysis of how innovations in the social technologies of the arts seek to translate the city and transform lives.The research project will ask what happens when artists translate ideas and practices from one cultural context to another: what gets lost and what gets learned in the adaptation? How are those who make the translations themselves transformed? How mutual is the act of translation and how sustainable is the process of transformation? If translation is, as is often said, a betrayal then how do we understand and evaluate the importance of the gaps and losses that open up during the process?Through a mapping of Anglo-Brazilian arts and cultural exchange projects produced during the transition between two stagings of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (2012-2016), this project will research how we can create new ways of practising the art of cultural exchange. In the context of an intense interest in creating new cultural dialogues with Brazil in recent and coming years, this project will ask how the UK and Brazil translate each other inflected through cultural exchanges mediated by voices from the periphery. THE ART OF CULTURAL EXCHANGE will investigate how the emergent 'interpreters' and intermediaries of Brazil's own peripheries are engaged in a process of translation through cultural exchanges that can re-interpret UK social realities. The translators in this instance will include young artists and cultural activists emerging in Rio de Janeiro through a series of arts-based projects in favelas and peripheral communities, who will be direct participants in the research process. It will also link these particular artists, organisations and movements to other peripheral Brazilian cultural manifestations, both contemporary and historic.The research will offer an opportunity to examine processes of cultural exchange involving Brazilian arts practitioners collaborating with a range of UK arts organisations, as they seek to translate ideas, ideologies and forms of knowledge into new contexts. Arts and cultural policy debates in the UK over the last decade have struggled to resist a dualism in which the need to maintain the aesthetic 'excellence' of the artistic endeavour is pitted against the search for a new social purpose and value for the arts. This proposed research project will connect to, build on and contribute to those debates, investigating how radical Brazilian ideas and practices can bring fresh perspectives, alternative frameworks and different ways of working. The investigation will be a collaboration between academics, artists, policy makers, social and cultural agencies to discover other models for cultural exchanges. It will open up the possibilities of different approaches and methodologies for UK arts organizations and policy makers, and aims to contribute to the strengthening of cultural and academic dialogues between Brazil and the UK. THE ART OF CULTURAL EXCHANGE looks to the peripheral urban territories of Rio de Janeiro for an exchange that offers new ways to translate our own values and experiences in the UK, providing a challenge to ideas that characterise so much of our own cultural debates and perhaps by extension the very idea of translation itself.