We, Islands 2014 / 2023
We, Islands, was shown at the Galleri Mejan in June 2014, a second iteration was shown in Translating Worlds, at Depo Istanbul in November 2023 curated by Nilüfer Sasmazer and Milan Vukašinovic.
"Stephanie Misa takes us to the outskirts of big cities, contemporary borderlands where immigrants exist as islands, trapped in a “separation from the whole within the whole,” in the words of M. Cavalcante. Misa’s long-term research project We, Islands combines conversations with two teenagers from the Bangladeshi and Kurdish diasporas who live in the marginalized suburbs of Stockholm, with personal and found objects. In contrast to normative views, their experiences reveal translation as a relation of inequality between languages, sustained by socioeconomic and political structures. Diasporic subjects are literally translators, proprietors of multiple consciousness, whose survival depends on code-switching, in premodern and modern times alike. A medieval Georgian immigrant, Euthymios the Athonite, first a child hostage in Constantinople, started speaking Georgian only after a divine intervention, according to his hagiography. He grew up to become an unrecognized trend-setter in the Greek literature of his age. Being a diasporic subject herself, Misa manifests the intention to “explore the potential, agency, and vitality of ‘bastard languages’ within the boundaries of the unwritten word.” This derogatory term is often used to designate the linguistic practices that disregard national correctness and class propriety, making a liberating mixture of words from diverse locations and registers, past and present, ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures. Exemplified by the taming of the racially-charged use of the French word for cockroach in modern Swedish, the bastardization is a linguistic re-appropriation of marginality that lets a border cut straight through one’s heart, and then crosses it defiantly. "
Mercedes Azpilicueta, Annabelle Binnerts, Cansu Çakar, Alev Ersan, Setareh Fatehi, Fikos, Dejan Kaludjerovi?, Lucie Kamuswekera, Stephanie Misa, Rehan Miskci, Daniel Otero Torres, Elsa Sahal, Walid Siti, Lika Tarkhan Mouravi
DEPO / Tütün Deposu
Lüleci Hendek Caddesi No.12
Tophane 34425 ?stanbul
November 29, 2023 - January 27, 2024
