En Otras Palabras
(In Other Words)
Kevin Trujillo
Language defines the boundaries of our world. In our daily lives, we have difficulty registering and making sense of things we cannot name. Language undergoes its challenges, values, and beliefs, often generating beguiling words. Such words have a corresponding reality. In certain languages, it is easier to convey concepts or ideas than in others. Limiting what we can and cannot experience.
En Otras Palabras (In Other Words) is a mixed media installation based on untranslatable words that emerge from my native tongue (Mexican Spanish). These words encapsulate the complexity and ambiguity of a situation one experiences in day-to-day life. The artworks possess a syntax aesthetic style that can be acknowledged in two ways, either verbally or visually. The portrayal was created to cause linguistic discomfort, uncertainty, and puzzlement for the reader, portraying the frustration of my experience as I went through the stages of English language acquisition. As I was striving to retain my Mexican roots while learning English, I realized that each language has a corresponding reality where idiosyncratic perspectives and interpretations are adjacent. This reality challenged my existing values and shaped my personality as I traversed cultural untranslatability.
Language is not an exact representation of reality; it is an instrument through which the soul of each culture comes into the material world. I got consumed by the desire to comprehend how the untranslatable has the capability to unfold itself, to wonder about itself, to scrutinize itself, to praise and deplore itself. My installation conveys how the untranslatable portrays the full spectrum of feelings that intersect between language and well-being.
