City in Translation is an artistic practice exploring languages in urban spaces and reclaiming our cities through the gesture of translation. Developed and run by canan marasligil.

*Finding Toni Morrison in Amsterdam, Summer 2020. Photo by Canan Marasligil*

Why I Translate Cities

Through my explorations, I inhabit cities, sometimes just for a short period of time. I capture moments, document and archive them, and make many words I see mine. Often, when I return to the same place, an ephemeral sentence I captured on camera may have disappeared. But thanks to my gesture, it remains in my personal archives, or published online, here on this site or on @cityintranslation. It is reinterpreted in my own way through the lens of my biography.

Languages move and texts become alive when they are read, shared, written and rewritten. Solidarity becomes tangible when people from all backgrounds and with different biographies in a neighbourhood are brought together around a table and asked to observe the languages in our environment and translate them, even if they are completely new to them. These languages exist and can be visible to those who are willing to see them. Through my City in Translation practice, I am trying to liberate the imaginary worlds of languages and therefore aim to create the possibility to step out of the idea that our world is monolingual, no matter how many languages we ourselves know.