“Back translation” is a performative translation model and an active de-colonial practice with a focus on Northern Ireland. It departs from existing performances and scores by artists coming out of a site of conflict and narrative contestation in a near past, as source material from which affective discourses, knowledge production and new art can arise.

Back Translation uses art as a catalyst filter to enable ethical and politically probing positions to speak about art, politics, translation and de-colonial processes from embodied positions in order to create new art works from. 

This presentation will introduce an example of such a process and its research path by exploring the relation between the political contingent embedded within an art work and its subjected carriers of agency of a score and how different considerations are visualized. The intention is to reach beyond re-enacting an art work by re-negotiating parts of history and subsequently the now through “unfixing” a narrative, a work of art in relation to place. It is a way of deconstructing the power dynamics and cultural biases by creating a place to renegotiate not just the work but what is prior to, beyond and ahead of the work and its surrounding environment through a new art work.