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

文化交流是国家和社区自我翻译和被他人翻译的重要手段。本研究旨在探讨文化交流作为一种翻译行为。它将侧重于通过艺术家、艺术生产和艺术方法的交流寻求变革。在英国文化委员会和英国艺术委员会的支持下，文化交流的艺术在QMUL和巴西联邦大学之间建立了一项研究合作，将绘制英巴文化交流的当前地形。该研究特别关注英国与巴西周边城市地区出现的艺术组织的交流，将扩展对艺术社会技术创新如何转化城市和改变生活的分析。该研究项目将探讨当艺术家将思想和实践从一种文化背景转换到另一种文化背景时会发生什么：在适应过程中失去了什么，又学到了什么？那些翻译自己的人是如何转变的？翻译行为的相互性如何？转换过程的可持续性如何？如果像人们常说的那样，翻译是一种背叛，那么我们如何理解和评估在翻译过程中出现的差距和损失的重要性呢？通过对两届奥运会和残奥会（2012-2016）之间的过渡时期产生的英巴艺术和文化交流项目的绘制，该项目将研究我们如何创造实践文化交流艺术的新方式。在最近几年和未来几年与巴西建立新的文化对话的强烈兴趣的背景下，该项目将探讨英国和巴西如何通过来自外围声音的文化交流来相互翻译。文化交流的艺术将探讨巴西周边地区的新兴“口译员”和中介如何通过文化交流参与翻译过程，从而重新解释英国的社会现实。在这种情况下，翻译人员将包括年轻艺术家和文化活动家，他们通过在贫民窟和周边社区的一系列艺术项目出现在巴西里约热内卢，他们将直接参与研究过程。它还将这些特殊的艺术家、组织和运动与巴西其他当代和历史文化表现形式联系起来。这项研究将提供一个机会来研究涉及巴西艺术从业者与一系列英国艺术组织合作的文化交流过程，因为他们寻求将思想、意识形态和知识形式转化为新的环境。在过去的十年里，英国的艺术和文化政策辩论一直在努力抵制一种二元论，在这种二元论中，需要保持艺术努力的美学“卓越”，而不是寻求新的社会目的和艺术价值。这个拟议的研究项目将连接、建立并促进这些辩论，研究激进的巴西思想和实践如何带来新的视角、替代框架和不同的工作方式。这项调查将是学者、艺术家、政策制定者、社会和文化机构之间的合作，以发现文化交流的其他模式。它将为英国艺术组织和政策制定者开辟不同方法和方法的可能性，旨在加强巴西和英国之间的文化和学术对话。文化交流的艺术将目光投向巴西里约热内卢的周边城市地区，寻求一种交流，为我们在英国翻译自己的价值观和经验提供了新的方式，为我们自己的文化辩论提供了一个挑战，也许可以扩展到翻译本身的想法。

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.