As part of the Passagem installation by Plataforma Explode!, this three-day workshop invites participants to engage with the transformative power of translation within abolitionist struggles. Through an immersive exploration of written and oral texts, we will actively engage in exercises of reading, co-translating, reimagining meanings, and reinterpreting words, documenting our processes both orally and in writing. The workshop will challenge us to reconsider translation as an imaginative practice, a form of study, re-connection, and community-building across languages and territories—ultimately, as a pathway to freedom. We will delve into translation as movement, act of care, survival mechanism, community work, and means to reimagine and reshape the world.

This three-day workshop runs October 22-24, 5:30-7:30pm each day, and is by invitation only. Please email ias@ucsc.edu for further information.

This event is part of a series of activations of the site-specific installation Passagem by a collective of Brazilian-born artists, Explode! Platform.

Jess Oliveira is a translator, professor, and poet. P.h.D in Literature and Culture from the Federal University of Bahia, where she was a member of the former Research Group Traduzindo no Atlântico Negro, coordinated by Professor Denise Carrascosa. She holds a B.A in German and Portuguese from the University of São Paulo and a Master’s degree in Translation Studies from the Federal University of Santa Catarina. A finalist for the  2020 Jabuti Award (Brazil) in the category Translation, she participated in the artist residency Rethinking the Aesthetics of the Colony in Johannesburg, South Africa, and of the homonymous platform for translation studies and political imagination across the diasporas from 2019 to 2020. Between 2020 and 2023, she was a visiting professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Colorado College. Notable authors she has translated include Denise Ferreira da Silva, Dionne Brand, Patricia Hill Collins, Tanya Saunders, Lélia Gonzalez, Leda Maria Martins, bell hooks, Grada Kilomba, May Ayim, tatiana nascimento, Ibi Zoboi, Sobonfu Somé, Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, among others. She is currently part of the cocoruto translation-art duo, a platform of experimentation in translation. 

About Explode! Platform

Founded by Cláudio Bueno and João Simões in Brazil, Explode! Platform operates at the intersections of art, pedagogy, and social justice. Cláudio Bueno, from São Paulo, Brazil, is a professor in the Art Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. João Simões, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is an artist, curator, researcher, and designer.