It all began one late evening in the capital of D.R. Congo KInshasa, when a young Congolese gave an improvised speech for two white Europeans who were travelling through the country. The two travellers could not understand the speech of the young Congolese as it was given in French and Lingala, a language influenced by the many European languages colonisation brought to the Congo in the previous century. For that reason, the speech was recorded on tape, which made it possible for the young Danish artist Christian Danielewitz to restage it in a different context and present it to a new audience.

On the basis of recent debate about cultural translation and using his interest in the linguistic repercussions of European colonialism as his point of departure, Danielewitz, with the aid of two interpreters, staged a live reenactment of the speech in the artist run project space Koh-i-noor. In the small gallery interior in Vesterbro, Copenhagen, Danielewitz had placed a Congolese interpreter who translated from Lingala to French opposite a second interpreter who did a simultanous translation from French into English. Over the course of the three-hour-long performance it gradually became clear that the starting points of the two interpreters regarding the ambitious political vision of the young Congolese differed from each other. The interpreters physical presence and influence on each other was part of the premise of the staging.

The Candidate - as the performance was called - made visible the mediation that is implicit in translation. It illustrated how in translation there is always some degree or other of loss of meaning, since the information you get has been interpreted and the meaning therefore transformed and recreated. To put it another way, via the translation process of the two interpreters, certain linguistic structures were revealed, that illustrated certain characteristic (post)colonial relations and raised once more the classic question, as to who is speaking on whose behalf.

Excerpt from New Danish Art 2009

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