Ricarda Vidal
I am a text-maker, translator and curator and Senior Lecturer in cultural studies at the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College London. My research focuses on an expanded notion of translation, communication and meaning-making across cultures and languages. Together with Madeleine Campbell (University of Edinburgh) I lead the international AHRC-funded Experiential Translation Network (www.experientialtranslation.net). I'm also interested in practice-based and -led research, which informs my two most recent publications, Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Borders: Intersemiotic Journeys across Media (Palgrave 2019), a collection of essays, poetry and art texts, and Home on the Move: Two Poems go on a Journey (Parthian, 2019), a collection of poems, intersemiotic and multilingual translations.
I am currently working on an edited volume on Experiential Translation.
Previously I have published on urban space, cinematic architecture, the legacy of Modernism and Romanticism, speed, the car and driving as cultural phenomena as well as society’s fascination with violent death.
I am currently working on an edited volume on Experiential Translation.
Previously I have published on urban space, cinematic architecture, the legacy of Modernism and Romanticism, speed, the car and driving as cultural phenomena as well as society’s fascination with violent death.
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Books by Ricarda Vidal
The first of two volumes, this book focuses on questions of materiality and play. Drawing together contributions on theory, methodology and practice from translators, scholars and practitioners working in the creative and performing arts, this book explores how contemporary, experiential acts of interpretation, mediation and negotiation can serve to bridge social and cultural discontinuities across time and space. These range from ancestral past to digital present, from rural to urban environments across the globe. Experiential translation applies a transdisciplinary lens to problematize views of translation and untranslatability traditionally bound by structuralist frames of reference and the reserve of professional linguistic translation. The chapters in this book apply this experiential lens to understand a pluriverse of creative translation practices where the translator’s subject position in relation to the ‘original’ is transformed by the role of experimentation, creativity and play.
This book and its companion volume The Translation of Experience: Cultural Artefacts in Experiential Translation will be of particular interest to translators and arts practitioners, scholars and researchers in the transdisciplinary field of humanities.
Funding: This work was supported by UKRI under AHRC Grant AH/V008234/1, awarded to Ricarda Vidal, King’s College London (Principal Investigator) and Madeleine Campbell, University of Edinburgh (Co-Investigator).
to this book. We envisage our book to provide a resource that complements, rather than competes with, readers and textbooks in translation studies, given its unique interdisciplinary approach and complementarity to fields and disciplines in the Arts and Humanities including
Fine Art, Comparative Literature, Semiotics, Intercultural Studies, Education and many more. Much of the work previously published on intersemiotic translation has been confined to film studies and advertising (also referred to as intermedial studies) and to a lesser extent to book illustration, or to chapters in books on art or ekphrasis. Successive editions of translation studies readers, from Lawrence Venuti’s (1999–2012) to Jeremy Munday’s (2001–2016), cover Roman Jakobson’s seminal
“On Linguistic Aspects of Translation” (1959), and Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” (1923), but do not delve into contemporary intersemiotic practice or theoretical approaches to the concept of intersemiotic translation. Further, those that do focus primarily
on the medium or the intermedial dimensions of film or theatre tend to be more concerned with iconicity (see, e.g., Lars Elleström 2016), adaptation and representation of the source artefact than with the performative, ephemeral and subjective experience of the participant in an intersemiotic translation event. In this sense, our approach is both more
applied (with implications for pedagogy and cultural literacy) and more interested in the process than the product of intersemiotic translation (with implications for the growing discipline of practice as research).
This publication therefore offers an opportunity to fill a gap in an interdisciplinary research space where academics, educators and practitioners can exchange knowledge and know-how.
Why are we so obsessed by cars? ‘Car crash culture’ is a symptom of the twentieth century, Ricarda Vidal argues in this book, revealing that our love of the car and technology is caused by the continuing influence of turn-of-the-century ideas: the Futurist technological utopia and the Romantic return to nature and desire. Artists, writers and filmmakers have explored this troubled love affair with the automobile throughout the past century. The work of F. T. Marinetti, Giacomo Balla, Jack Kerouac, Andy Warhol, Jean-Luc Godard (Week End), Richard Sarafian (Vanishing Point), J. G. Ballard and David Cronenberg (Crash), Quentin Tarantino (Death Proof) and Sarah Lucas, among others, are shown to pursue these ideals, even as developments in modern cities and telecommunications continue to change the nature of speed and technology.
While the first half of the twentieth century was concerned with the celebration of speed and acceleration, the car crash has now become an obsession of contemporary culture. Vidal concludes that our attraction to the car crash reflects the contemporary way of life in the West, which is defined by a Futurist technophilia, a Romantic longing for a higher meaning and an undeniable infatuation with the automobile."
Review by Enda Duffy:
‘Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture: A Century of Romantic Futurisms by Ricarda Vidal is a terrific addition to speed studies. At its heart is the insight that the car crash functions in Western culture today much as the ruined cathedral did for the Victorians: a scene of lurid fascination where all our desires – about technology, excitement and what it means to be human – converge. Vidal reads Futurism as a late Romantic movement. She then traces the persistence of Futurism’s spirit and paradoxes in a whole century of work on car culture, from Kerouac’s On the Road to Cortázar’s ‘The Motorway of the South’ and Ballard’s Crash, to Warhol’s car crash silk-screens and Antun Maračić’s photograph series Cro Car Crash Chronicle, After War/hol. Equally at home in literature, manifestos, theory, film, photography, painting, sculpture, installation art and pop culture, this book is full of rich and unexpected readings of works that deal with our deepest fears and excitements in the twentieth-century duel between humanism and technology. Eschewing any easy moralism, alive to speed as both ‘the only divinity’ today and its potential horror, Vidal’s book is a clear-eyed reading of high points of a new, more grim romanticism, in which the crash is the spectacle of finitude. Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture is a brilliant reading of the convergence of desire and technology in some of the most challenging works of modern culture.’
Enda Duffy, Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, author of The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism"
“The conceptual and methodological concerns contained within this collection are very wide ranging and… there is something for every reader who hails from an arts and humanities or social science background.” · Hannah Rumble, University of Bath
The social and cultural changes of the last century have transformed death from an everyday fact to something hidden from view. Shifting between the practical and the theoretical, the professional and the intimate, the real and the fictitious, this collection of essays explores the continued power of death over our lives. It examines the idea and experience of death from an interdisciplinary perspective, including studies of changing burial customs throughout Europe; an account of a“dying party” in the Netherlands; examinations of the fascination with violent death in crime fiction and the phenomenon of serial killer art; analyses of death and bereavement in poetry, fiction, and autobiography; and a look at audience reactions to depictions of death on screen. By studying and considering how death is thought about in the contemporary era, we might restore the natural place it has in our lives.
Divided into five thematic parts and 18 chapters the book explores the dreams, plans and hopes, but also the nightmares and fears reflected in utopian thinking since 1900 in the Western hemisphere. Focusing on a variety of case studies the authors examine what has become of all those possible worlds, how they reflect their contemporary culture and society and what, if anything, they mean for our present, or indeed, our future. Of particular interest are the visual representations of these futures, powerful reminders of the boundless energy of the human imagination. The book is, hence not only a retrospective of past utopias and their after-lives but also an invitation to look towards our possible futures."
Papers by Ricarda Vidal
Asemic writing (writing without alphabet) appears congenial to our enquiry. Exploring an asemic text requires the ‘reader’ or ‘experiencer’ to embrace incomprehension, moving into the realm of sensual encounter. While asemic writing looks like, but isn’t writing, this chapter argues that it can be read and translated if approached through Tong King Lee’s theory of memesis and ludic translation, and Clive Scott’s notion of translation as “centrifugal” and his focus on the active participation of the reader in the text. The chapter presents findings from two public workshops which focused on collaborative, creative translations of asemic texts. Exploring performative embodiment and materialities in translation, the authors argue that the asemic takes on the meaning of a universal in-between language where material gesture is expanded and encapsulated in sound and movement. They conclude that it is above all uncertainty, the hallmark of the asemic, which is central to meaning-making per se.
The first of two volumes, this book focuses on questions of materiality and play. Drawing together contributions on theory, methodology and practice from translators, scholars and practitioners working in the creative and performing arts, this book explores how contemporary, experiential acts of interpretation, mediation and negotiation can serve to bridge social and cultural discontinuities across time and space. These range from ancestral past to digital present, from rural to urban environments across the globe. Experiential translation applies a transdisciplinary lens to problematize views of translation and untranslatability traditionally bound by structuralist frames of reference and the reserve of professional linguistic translation. The chapters in this book apply this experiential lens to understand a pluriverse of creative translation practices where the translator’s subject position in relation to the ‘original’ is transformed by the role of experimentation, creativity and play.
This book and its companion volume The Translation of Experience: Cultural Artefacts in Experiential Translation will be of particular interest to translators and arts practitioners, scholars and researchers in the transdisciplinary field of humanities.
Funding: This work was supported by UKRI under AHRC Grant AH/V008234/1, awarded to Ricarda Vidal, King’s College London (Principal Investigator) and Madeleine Campbell, University of Edinburgh (Co-Investigator).
to this book. We envisage our book to provide a resource that complements, rather than competes with, readers and textbooks in translation studies, given its unique interdisciplinary approach and complementarity to fields and disciplines in the Arts and Humanities including
Fine Art, Comparative Literature, Semiotics, Intercultural Studies, Education and many more. Much of the work previously published on intersemiotic translation has been confined to film studies and advertising (also referred to as intermedial studies) and to a lesser extent to book illustration, or to chapters in books on art or ekphrasis. Successive editions of translation studies readers, from Lawrence Venuti’s (1999–2012) to Jeremy Munday’s (2001–2016), cover Roman Jakobson’s seminal
“On Linguistic Aspects of Translation” (1959), and Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” (1923), but do not delve into contemporary intersemiotic practice or theoretical approaches to the concept of intersemiotic translation. Further, those that do focus primarily
on the medium or the intermedial dimensions of film or theatre tend to be more concerned with iconicity (see, e.g., Lars Elleström 2016), adaptation and representation of the source artefact than with the performative, ephemeral and subjective experience of the participant in an intersemiotic translation event. In this sense, our approach is both more
applied (with implications for pedagogy and cultural literacy) and more interested in the process than the product of intersemiotic translation (with implications for the growing discipline of practice as research).
This publication therefore offers an opportunity to fill a gap in an interdisciplinary research space where academics, educators and practitioners can exchange knowledge and know-how.
Why are we so obsessed by cars? ‘Car crash culture’ is a symptom of the twentieth century, Ricarda Vidal argues in this book, revealing that our love of the car and technology is caused by the continuing influence of turn-of-the-century ideas: the Futurist technological utopia and the Romantic return to nature and desire. Artists, writers and filmmakers have explored this troubled love affair with the automobile throughout the past century. The work of F. T. Marinetti, Giacomo Balla, Jack Kerouac, Andy Warhol, Jean-Luc Godard (Week End), Richard Sarafian (Vanishing Point), J. G. Ballard and David Cronenberg (Crash), Quentin Tarantino (Death Proof) and Sarah Lucas, among others, are shown to pursue these ideals, even as developments in modern cities and telecommunications continue to change the nature of speed and technology.
While the first half of the twentieth century was concerned with the celebration of speed and acceleration, the car crash has now become an obsession of contemporary culture. Vidal concludes that our attraction to the car crash reflects the contemporary way of life in the West, which is defined by a Futurist technophilia, a Romantic longing for a higher meaning and an undeniable infatuation with the automobile."
Review by Enda Duffy:
‘Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture: A Century of Romantic Futurisms by Ricarda Vidal is a terrific addition to speed studies. At its heart is the insight that the car crash functions in Western culture today much as the ruined cathedral did for the Victorians: a scene of lurid fascination where all our desires – about technology, excitement and what it means to be human – converge. Vidal reads Futurism as a late Romantic movement. She then traces the persistence of Futurism’s spirit and paradoxes in a whole century of work on car culture, from Kerouac’s On the Road to Cortázar’s ‘The Motorway of the South’ and Ballard’s Crash, to Warhol’s car crash silk-screens and Antun Maračić’s photograph series Cro Car Crash Chronicle, After War/hol. Equally at home in literature, manifestos, theory, film, photography, painting, sculpture, installation art and pop culture, this book is full of rich and unexpected readings of works that deal with our deepest fears and excitements in the twentieth-century duel between humanism and technology. Eschewing any easy moralism, alive to speed as both ‘the only divinity’ today and its potential horror, Vidal’s book is a clear-eyed reading of high points of a new, more grim romanticism, in which the crash is the spectacle of finitude. Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture is a brilliant reading of the convergence of desire and technology in some of the most challenging works of modern culture.’
Enda Duffy, Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, author of The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism"
“The conceptual and methodological concerns contained within this collection are very wide ranging and… there is something for every reader who hails from an arts and humanities or social science background.” · Hannah Rumble, University of Bath
The social and cultural changes of the last century have transformed death from an everyday fact to something hidden from view. Shifting between the practical and the theoretical, the professional and the intimate, the real and the fictitious, this collection of essays explores the continued power of death over our lives. It examines the idea and experience of death from an interdisciplinary perspective, including studies of changing burial customs throughout Europe; an account of a“dying party” in the Netherlands; examinations of the fascination with violent death in crime fiction and the phenomenon of serial killer art; analyses of death and bereavement in poetry, fiction, and autobiography; and a look at audience reactions to depictions of death on screen. By studying and considering how death is thought about in the contemporary era, we might restore the natural place it has in our lives.
Divided into five thematic parts and 18 chapters the book explores the dreams, plans and hopes, but also the nightmares and fears reflected in utopian thinking since 1900 in the Western hemisphere. Focusing on a variety of case studies the authors examine what has become of all those possible worlds, how they reflect their contemporary culture and society and what, if anything, they mean for our present, or indeed, our future. Of particular interest are the visual representations of these futures, powerful reminders of the boundless energy of the human imagination. The book is, hence not only a retrospective of past utopias and their after-lives but also an invitation to look towards our possible futures."
Asemic writing (writing without alphabet) appears congenial to our enquiry. Exploring an asemic text requires the ‘reader’ or ‘experiencer’ to embrace incomprehension, moving into the realm of sensual encounter. While asemic writing looks like, but isn’t writing, this chapter argues that it can be read and translated if approached through Tong King Lee’s theory of memesis and ludic translation, and Clive Scott’s notion of translation as “centrifugal” and his focus on the active participation of the reader in the text. The chapter presents findings from two public workshops which focused on collaborative, creative translations of asemic texts. Exploring performative embodiment and materialities in translation, the authors argue that the asemic takes on the meaning of a universal in-between language where material gesture is expanded and encapsulated in sound and movement. They conclude that it is above all uncertainty, the hallmark of the asemic, which is central to meaning-making per se.
Revolve:R includes work by artists based in the following countries; Belgium, Croatia, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, the UK and the USA:
Diana Ali, Todd Diciurcio, Patrick Galway, Verena Hagler, Alice Hendy, Ilana Levine, Antun Maracic, Domingo Martinez, Leila Peacock, Bernd Reichert, Matt Rowe, Emily Speed, Clare Thornton & Emma Cocker, Sam Treadaway, Linnea Vedder, Ricarda Vidal, and the mathematician Oscar Bandtlow.
Revolve:R is a project in visual correspondence, curated by us -
Sam Treadaway and Ricarda Vidal - in collaboration with a number of international artists, which culminates in the publishing of a limited edition bookwork. Revolve:R explores the possibilities of an exchange of ideas via a visual and tactile - rather than virtual and digital - form of communication. As site and source of collaborative experimentation for diverse artistic practises, Revolve:R is a vehicle for a new collective language, made physical in the shape of the Revolve:R bookwork.
How it works:
A group of artists were invited to take part in an exchange of pages, carrying any one or combination of the following: drawing, painting, print-making, photography, collage, or text. All artists initially received a copy of the same page, produced by us, to which they had four weeks in which to respond. When all responses had been received we viewed and discussed the work, noting shared concepts, themes and details that we found particularly interesting. We then produced a new page, our response, in reply to this collection of responses. This page was again sent to all artists. Each cycle of correspondence we call a Revolve. After six Revolves all pages are scanned, printed on 150gms paper and bound in a limited edition, bookwork. This we call a Revolve:R
Now we need your support and backing so we can publish the first edition of the Revolve:R bookwork. Please visit our Sponsume funding campaign here - http://www.sponsume.com/project/revolver"