A Return to the Pre-verbal

“...true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal”.¹

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On the 6th April 1994, thirty-one year old Margaret Wright was violently murdered in a loyalist band hall in Belfast, having been incorrectly presumed Catholic.

Seven years later, and following the Good Friday Agreement, Belfast artist Heather Allen staged Klub (2001) at a makeshift bar in Belfast. The performance comprised a reading of poems titled ‘Let’s Have’, music, dancing, and a DJ, with this temporary gathering space also playing an active role. 

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“[...] and Margaret
I’m thinking of you
hoping for the best
getting the worst [...]”

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In 2024, artist Saskia Holmkvist released a new film Margaret (Back Translation), taking Klub as a point of departure, for a conversation around history, testimony, and the limits of what can be spoken or translated.

Memory serves many purposes. Allen’s performance demonstrated the active role of individual and cultural memory in informing and shaping the present. It offered a different type of testimony: what it feels like to be in a certain place at a certain time, a young woman coping with a loaded history and an aftermath.In this unfolding dialogue around memory, history, and witnessing, what do three women who never met each other have in common?

Back-translation

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Saskia Holmkvist’s practice is concerned with the limits of translation and how this affects our personal relations and historical trajectories, with a particular focus on contemporary history, translation processes, representation, and ethics. Holmkvist manifests her research into video, film, and performance; with past works investigating the nuance of communication and how processes such as translation influence the mediation of events and meaning. In this new work, Margaret (Back Translation), Holmkvist enters a dialogue with past and present voices from Belfast, a place with a contested history, using the method of ‘back-translation’. In simple terms, back-translation is when an already translated text is converted back into its original source text. The intention being to detect any discrepancies or differences, and highlight what has changed between the text, experiences, and context with this act of translation, by bringing it back to where it started. Of course as languages are alive and context-bound, a true return is never possible. Back-translation showcases how these changes can shape texts, and the power to improve or deteriorate a text, or even provide extra information that may not have been available at source.

Research and Process

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Translation, in its standard professional setting, relies on a thorough process that includes numerous revisions and consultations. Reflecting this rigour, Holmkvist’s research (i.e. translation process) was conscientious in adapting these academic methods into an artistic framework. In what she refers to as a ‘circular mode of connectivity’, the starting point for this engagement with another history was to first identify a performance artist of the same age in Northern Ireland, an act Holmkvist describes as a “seeing yourself in someone else from another place”.² This gesture also forms part of her ongoing exploration into female performance lineages. A ghostly image of Heather Allen within a text by Suzanna Chan³ that caught Holmkvist’s attention. When her attempts to contact Allen became unsuccessful, it created an absence that became the driving force of the work, with Chan’s text as the original source text for the back-translation journey Holmkvist was embarking upon.

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Parallel to these developments, Holmkvist assembled a diverse group of artists and academics to interrogate Chan’s text, the haunting image of Allen, as well as questions around the ethics and methodologies of dealing with such a source that left more questions behind than answers. Other key contributors to the process became Seamus Harahan,⁴ one of Klub’s participants, who provided Holmkvist with lo-fi VHS footage recording of the 2001 performance, and a group of young women that Holmkvist gathered in a workshop⁵ at Ulster University, Belfast, with these conversations offering an intergenerational perspective.

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Following these years of collaborative and social research, Holmkvist was finally faced with the challenge of creating a ’back-translation’ from the constellation of unresolved fragments of silence and gaps.

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As with any work intended to engage with another’s experience, Margaret (Back Translation) raises ethical quandaries around representation and who has the right to speak on behalf of others. This is especially pertinent in the context of Northern Ireland with its history of ‘outsiders’ documenting the Troubles and its aftermath. Frequently, these representations used visuals shaped by inherited tropes of what a conflict should look like, imitating other press photographs without an understanding of local nuance or context. While not unique to this conflict, such concerns also apply to the wider history of photography and film, and the exploitative connotations associated with photojournalism and street photography.

The Emotional Image

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“A bail hearing was told
that a man saw her
seated in a store room
with a hood over her head”

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Bearing witness is powerful. It can be very charged and problematic— think of the many direct and complicit witnesses to the many brutalities that occurred during the Troubles and that continue to occur all over the world right now—but it can also be an act of support, of justice, and of resistance. There is much to be gained from encouraging a shared experience, a shared life, and a shared state of being and of feeling. Holmkvist’s approach brings this to the fore, suggesting that this is an obligation, a responsibility we have to learn about and regard one another. In contrast to the exploitative precedents and examples of representation, Holmkvist’s process is deeply embedded in empathy and the genuine desire to want to relate and to understand. Margaret (Back Translation) is an exercise in solidarity, amalgamating critical fabulation,⁶ documentary techniques, archival footage, and testimonies. The resulting piece advances the image as a site at which social and political realities can be reimagined and revisited. 

Holmkvist’s exhibition, under the homage title of KLub is where I experienced this work. The exhibition, much like the film itself, presents a space of witnessing and responsibility. During the show’s run, an off-site programme of performances, taking place in an artist-run bar elsewhere in Oslo, have been programmed. When taking place, they are live streamed into the exhibition space. When inactive, the room fills with the palpable presence of an absence, an anticipation, and memory, like the original Klub, it also acts as a space of hospitality, whereby the audience are authorised to participate, encouraged to act, and to share responsibility. At all times, the soundscape from the film—a polyphony of testimony and of a party—permeates the exhibition space. It is the voice and sound that serves as the ‘carrier’ of a collective memory and much like memory and testimony, we are left with lost voices and plenty of room for personal interpretation. A sparse selection of photographs punctuate the exhibition, providing fragments and traces of Holmkvist’s process and the project’s participants, cleverly avoiding the conventional displays of archives, letters, and texts, which can all be accessed through complimentary published materials.⁷

The film itself plays with contradictions. What we see, hear, and ultimately get, are not one. It opens with a scripted performance of two young men in a quintessential suburban area of Northern Ireland. They approach a home and at its entrance question its resident if she knows Margaret. The scene plays with documentary conventions, presenting a clearly scripted and slow dialogue to contrast with what we are seeing, including a sort of denied reverse shot with an off-screen, invisible, silent husband. We leave the unresolved and strange conversation and are now faced with a bus stop, red-lit, contrasting against the backdrop of a blue dusk. On many occasions, the film’s aesthetic is, serendipitously, reminiscent of the works of Megan Doherty and Audrey Blue—two young women artists from Northern Ireland—works which also make use of blurring the lines between fiction and documentary. Sheltering under this uncanny bus stop, we meet two young women on their way to a night out, but the conversation here is far from friendly and casual, possibly to our surprise, it is a political discourse, again unexpected and urgent. We are then transported to a bar, where a staff member recites a text directly into the camera. At first it sounds like a witness testimony, then we realise it is a poem. The young woman's voice is seamlessly transitioned into another, into Allen’s, the historic and contemporary merge. We are now at the nexus of the film, witnesses to the VHS footage of Allen’s reading and performance in Klub from 2001. This is the moment when everything becomes real, the noise settles, and a sort of clarity or consolidation arrives, softly but all at once. The film ends in a static, blue, night time landscape. We listen to a collective of young women’s voices, speaking about their experience of being the post-Troubles generation, the experience of being a female in Belfast, and about silence.

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This work marks a significant shift in Holmkvist’s practice. While previous works may have been rooted in the interpretive and somatic representations within the image, Margaret (Back Translation) uses the fictional to create emotional and sensory imagery, as a conduit for a political narrative. In the artist’s own reflection “the work I used to make was with the presence of bodies [...] [the imagery] is now speaking much more than the text itself and filling in the gaps, the in-betweens [...] there is always something in between that is not connected”.⁸

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In presenting these paradoxical scenes and unfinished threads, our expectations and anticipation for answers is subverted. We are instead asked to suspend our assumptions and logic, embrace uncertainty, and surrender to emotion, actions that are successfully achieved through the deftly constructed sound and image. The foundations of the narrative are unstable, full of absences, unresolved conversations, invisible and silent people, fragmental testimony, but none of that matters. It doesn’t matter if it is real or fiction, documentary or script, the layer of critical fabulation and the poetics of imagery and sound propose a deeper truth, penetrating beyond the reach of fact, offering a deeper insight and conversation than archive or newspaper report.