A few weeks ago, during a State visit to Mexico, Prince Willem Alexander from the Netherlands, was heard saying in Spanish: Camarón que se duerme se lo lleva la chingada (sic). He was addressing an audience of politicans and bussiness people, in an official speech about water technologies. After the explosion of laughter from the audience, his facial expression indicated that he did not seem to grasp the full meaning of the word he naively used (the Mexican proverb he quoted says literally: A shrimp that sleeps is washed away by the tide.)
La chingada (as a femenine noun) is imbued with cultural significance. Whatever the linguistic meanings, which run the full gamut from fuck to sick, great joy to deep sadness, the term is never used in the media or public speech, especially not by power brokers. The word and its countless variatons do appear in the movies, novels, poetry, visual arts and popular crafts. La chingada is part of the people´s language, the street wise resource to name something that otherwise is hard to grasp.
Although the Dutch media reported the incident as a curiosity or the clumsiness of burocracy, a minority focused on the intricacies of cultural translations. this is the point I would like to make here. The translation of the prince´s speech was adorned by a piece or rethoric in a language that nobody understood, but they thought they knew the meaning of La Chingada , in the end turning a prince into the laughing stock of the gentiles.
As I was reading the posting by Christoph Zellweger in WGA dedicated to Jorge, I thought again about that problem. Christoph argues that Jorge Manilla assumes that people will understand the subtleties of his images or objects, by referreing to the cultural background that informs them. Having worked in exhibitions for years now, I found myself more often than not puzzled by the ways people interpret what they see.
Communication or transmission of information is indeed complicated by the fact that people who communicate assume that the others, the receivers, will understand their meanings passively. The usual is the opossite: people interpret all the time, but they do it from a cultural and personal platform unbeknown to the speaker.
As artist and cultural communicators, I believe that we should take for granted the impossibility to translate the experience of art as such or language as metaphor. Or to put it in Cristoph Zelleweger words: art is tool for people without language. Literal meanings do not exist in art.
Obviously politicians and people in places of power depend on interpreters and translations, and when these fail they become aware of the communication dilemma: it is risky to try to use a word or a sentence which is deeply embeded in a regional significance.
Artists do seem to have the gift to apropiate meanings; they can change them to their own interest and transform their meaning. But not always… how many times you found yourself baffled by people who think that your works are something completly opossite to what you intended them to be, even at the point of become insulting or degrading?
Misunderstanding and its consquences are our daily bread, trying to work around them or even leave the door open to build it into your work can be a healthy attitude.
