International Laboratoy for Imaginatibe Traslation
with the support of:
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Imaginative translation does not seek literal equivalence between languages; rather, it is conceived as a creative, situated, and relational act.
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Translation ceases to be a technical procedure and becomes an artistic, political, and affective practice, capable of generating archive, community, and critical thought, while placing linguistic hierarchies under tension and questioning hegemonic regimes of knowledge.
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Imaginative translation understands translation not as a simple transfer of meanings between languages, but as an act of hospitality, creation, and listening. To translate, in this sense, is to open a space where one language can be hosted in the refuge of another, without losing its strangeness, its rhythm, or its memory.
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Rather than seeking exact equivalences, imaginative translation assumes the impossibility of total correspondence and works from that limit: where the arriving language transforms the receiving language, and vice versa. Each translation thus becomes an encounter—a sensitive and ethical negotiation between distinct linguistic, cultural, and affective worlds.
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Imaginative translation recognizes that every language carries specific ways of perceiving, naming, and inhabiting the world. Translating therefore means imagining conditions of welcome, building refuges and temporary registers where a language can remain, resonate, and leave a trace in another. In this process, translation becomes a gesture of care and responsibility, as well as a creative practice that produces new meanings, displacements, and forms of relation.
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To translate is to imagine: to open a space of listening, negotiation, and ethical responsibility in the face of the untranslatable. Imaginative translation embraces failure, misalignment, lack, and impossibility—not as errors, but as productive sites from which new forms of meaning emerge.
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Imaginative translation is activated as a collective process, where words are not “explained” or “domesticated,” but accompanied by stories, testimonies, images, gestures, and contexts that expand their field of meaning. From this perspective, translation does not end with the text: it is a living practice that involves bodies, voices, silences, memories, and contexts. To translate imaginatively is to accept that something always remains untranslated, and that in this remainder—in this ash—lies the political, poetic, and communal potency of languages.
¿Who we are?
Translation:
The International Laboratory for Imaginative Translation (LIPTI) is an artwork and a research–creation project by artist Ulises Matamoros Ascención. It unfolds across different venues as a temporary space for production, reflection, and encounter around translation, understood as a creative, political, and situated practice.
At each venue, LIPTI brings together a specific group of people who participate as members of the laboratory for that period. From this core group, a seminar–workshop is collectively designed, structured around specific discursive axes, always traversed by the notion of translation: between languages, materials, memories, bodies, archives, and territories.
Subsequently, an open call is launched for individuals interested in the proposed themes, inviting them to reflect and create through diverse artistic practices. Activities and exercises take place both within the laboratory space and in its surroundings or in different sites across the city, expanding the project’s field of action.
The laboratory remains open to the public throughout its development, allowing its processes, discussions, and spatial transformations to be visible. As the seminar–workshop progresses, the space is modified and accumulates materials, records, translations, works in progress, and traces of collective practices.
The LIPTI space is conceived simultaneously as:
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an open space for creation,
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a space of hosting and encounter,
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a pedagogical and exhibition device,
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and a living archive in constant transformation.
Although the project functions in itself as a process-based art exhibition, a final exhibition is envisaged—understood not as a definitive closure, but as a public activation of the processes, materials, and translations produced during the laboratory.
Venues
INTERNATIONAL LABORATOY FOR IMAGINATIVE TRASLATION
BARANQUILLA,COLOMBIA. ILIT proposes a theoretical and practical reflection on the acts of collecting, safeguarding, archiving, and translating within contemporary art. The program is structured around specific discursive axes, always traversed by the notion of translation, understood as a process that operates between languages, materials, memories, bodies, archives, and territories.
