We, Islands (2024) at Tranlating Worlds, Depo Istanbul. Photos by
We, Islands, was shown at the Galleri Mejan, Stockholm (2014), This iteration’s main piece is a video installation of a conversation series with three teenagers from the Stockholm Suburb of Tensta and Rinkeby. All are in their final year of High School in Sodermalm.
A second iteration was shown at the exhibit Translating Worlds, in Istanbul curated by Nilüfer Sasmazer and Milan Vukašinovic. The work is composed of a single channel video a booklet, and an audio installation.
DEPO / Tütün Deposu
November 29 12023 - January 27, 2024
THE EXHIBIT
"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,
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. "
Translating Worlds
Mercedes Azpilicueta, Annabelle Binnerts, Cansu Çakar, Alev Ersan, Setareh Fatehi, Fikos, Dejan Kaludjerović, Lucie Kamuswekera, Stephanie Misa, Rehan Miskci, Daniel Otero Torres, Elsa Sahal, Walid Siti, Lika Tarkhan Mouravi