Melanie Cobham
A Translated Foreignness
A Translated Foreignness is a compilation of works exploring language not only as a form of communication but as a way of demarcating identity, building a framework for cognition and behaviour. Having recently migrated to Australia, I suddenly found myself caught between my mother tongue and the English language, often bridging with gesture what my vocabulary was unable to address. As I focused on developing my English, my native Spanish started faded away, like a plant I forgot to water. I soon realised I could no longer communicate properly in any language.
The following works are an attempt to make sense of the in-between, finding comfort in a no-man’s-land amid languages, countries and identities. In this constant exercise, I explore sound, image, gesture and translation, in the hopes that they will serve me (us) as aids in communicating when language falls short, revealing what gets lost not just in translation but in language itself.
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Works List
Contemporary Relics
Installation
120 cm x 60 cm x 0.5cm
Found Venice street sign
2019
Subclass 500
Hand woven tapestries, sound.
Approximately 21cm x 29,7 cm each
2020
Undercurrents
Ballpoint pen on paper
8 cm x 8.2 respectively
2020
Unheard Voices
Music box, paper.
Variable dimensions
2019
Untitled
Cotton / Rayon tapestry. Automated Jacquard.
120 cm x 91 cm
2020
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“You ask me what I mean
by saying I have lost my tongue.
I ask you, what would you do
if you had two tongues in your mouth,
and lost the first one, the mother tongue,
and could not really know the other,
the foreign tongue.
You could not use them both together
even if you thought that way.
And if you lived in a place you had to
speak a foreign tongue,
your mother tongue would rot,
rot and die in your mouth
until you had to spit it out.
I thought I spit it out
but overnight while I dream,
munay hutoo kay aakhee jeebh aakhee bhasha
may thoonky nakhi chay
parantoo rattray svupnama mari bhasha pachi aavay chay
foolnee jaim mari bhasha nmari jeebh
modhama kheelay chay
fullnee jaim mari bhasha mari jeebh
modhama pakay chay
it grows back, a stump of a shoot
grows longer, grows moist, grows strong veins,
it ties the other tongue in knots,
the bud opens, the bud opens in my mouth,
it pushes the other tongue aside.
Everytime I think I've forgotten,
I think I've lost the mother tongue,
it blossoms out of my mouth.”
Sujata Bhatt, “Search for my Tongue” (1988)