For a week in June 2018, the collective gathered in Istria to explore the ways that through-ness (sometimes in the form of 通 tong) and prepositional relations might inform our work individually and together. We’ll gradually post some of the precipitates of that gathering here on the site, but in the meantime we share some reflections from the week below.
I really wanted to understand tong better…
to see “tong-ing” happen in new settings, and to tong in new ways myself… I felt that this became a shared effort among wonderful companions, but with such diversity and such startling originality that many of my existing tong-ish obsessions faded into the background. Judy
The Translating Vitalities project has been foundational…
in shaping a reorientation in my scholarly practice toward collaborative, transdisciplinary work across fields, crafts, and scholarly and practical worlds. In the years that it has existed, it has helped me to produce many lectures and seminars, essays, books, and collaborative projects and performances that would not otherwise have existed, and that continues. Carla
Cherry Blossom 2018 was outrageously lively…
The first day when everyone gave a potted version of their planned project the space between us was humming with cosmogonies, dissected bodies, boxes of desire, shadowed lithophanes, heart transplants, fluid bodies/body fluids, honey bees, brushes, papers and pencils, acupuncture sensations, adaptive flows, wild crafted herbs and the many elizabeths. So many diverse practices looking for alliances and new ways together – and there was more to come as we weren’t all there yet! Consistent with my other encounters with the TV collective the content was stimulating and challenging and the process for the entire week was open, warm, inclusive and unpolluted by egos and dramas. In terms of outcomes I had no idea that I was to translate a book into a poem and seek collaboration with Christie to illustrate it, or draft a children’s story, or give voice to boxed desires, in addition find a new approach to the paper I intended to write all the time. The management of our group encounters by Judy, Carla, and Volker is so well done that it appears seamless and the culture of respect and trust they generate is palpable. The structured week with lengthy unaccounted for time works well for me. There are so many reasons that I find TV meetings so important: they shake and transform my ideas about everything; they deepen my knowledge about many things; they give me hope that transdisciplinary collaborations are not only possible but productive; the impact of 6 days ripples into everything else I do; and I have come to love and respect you/these people for the precious beings you/they are. Sue
The relationship of the many components that go to make up a TV week…
continues to nourish each of us. As someone who spent 3 days in Seattle all those years ago not really understanding what was going on, it was a real pleasure to feel I could truly contribute, as well as to meet brave newcomers! Christie
It is such a rarity to find…
a group of scholars and practitioners that are truly free to relate and share their knowledge and to challenge themselves by removing any self imposed blinkers. Kate
The week in Istria provided hope…
for a peaceful way of working, for concentrated being together. I remember the last two stays with the group as stimulating and regenerating at the same time. There are clear but minimal rules, there is an external rhythm, an almost monastic culture of working. My ideal! Monastic anarchy! No dominant egos! No ego-trips! Instead creative spaces. Nobody is at home. Everybody has to interact in altered states, which is for me enables functioning group work. I came with a lot of baggage. Exhausted from a prolonged period of overworking I could have signed up for a burnout-therapy-wellness-retreat. Instead I defended the date against all demands from the institution. They asked what I am doing there. As usual I did not really know what to say. Who are we? If there is a “we”, collective identity, what defines this identity? I don’t know and in myself I would rather define what we are doing by how we are doing it. In our working group we have taken “slow reading” to a new level. For the last three years we explore, address, embody Merleau-Ponty’s chapter about the chiasm in his book “the invisible” with performances, poetry, fiction, breath-holding, analysis and synthesis. The process is intense and does not lend itself to a finite end product. I value this as a privilege with multiple indirect influences and almost no direct outcome or output. We re-connected as group and found ways of working across time zones and life worlds. This aspect of digital humanities is something we explore respectful in this group. Jens
I treasure the Translating Vitalities time each year…
It holds out a space to re-calibrate, to re-commit to approaching my writing with an openness, creativity and generosity that invites transformation. This time I came with a project about toxicity and healing and an excitement to think with others about plants. The comparison between ways of thinking and working with plants in China, Bosnia, Russia, Australia, and the US were very helpful…I left with new to two collaborative projects. The first is a series of postcards or letters to be exchanged with two TVC colleagues about plants. These are emerging under the working title of “An Epistolary Herbarium.” Stacey
My first experience of Translating Vitalities…
and my first impressions: intense, stimulating, surprising, tiring. I led a seminar on science and technology studies on the Wednesday afternoon. Discussions went in all sorts of directions and left me reflecting on what direction my own future research should take. Andy
I was surprised to find…
some serious thematic overlaps with specialists working in other disciplines. Translating Vitalities had a huge Impact on my horizon and with the understanding of this year I would like to be better prepared for next year. Leander
As a late-comer to this year’s gathering…
I spent much of my time observing and listening to what others had and were doing with plants, honey, bodies and other matters, and with concepts, texts, ideas, and words. Given the relative loneliness of my academic life I experienced this to be a great privilege, allowing me to divest myself of privately felt obligations “to produce.” Yet, after only three days, there emerged a number of concrete outcomes that may, if all comes to pass, profoundly impact my future engagements with the vital transformations of life and things in the history of Chinese medicine and beyond. Through-ness 通and non-action 無為are difficult practices that, nevertheless, are gradually revealing to me their productive powers. Volker
For me the week was extremely inspirational…
and quite productive. It was a great privilege to have time to listen, to think, to talk, to reflect, to write. I am usually too busy with my clinic and the university, always running from A to B, working late and not having any time for anything else. I really liked the interdisciplinary aspect of the event because it let me look at the meaning of tong from different perspectives, not just medical, thus deepening the understanding of this term, which will help me to write an article on what tong means in clinical acupuncture practice. Cinzia
This year, after 3 previous gatherings…
I finally felt that I had brought to the group some new way to explore the theoretical dialogues that many of the wonderful people who come to these events are engaged with. At my workshop several participants tackled a challenge of the project, which began as exploratory fun but then developed into a deeper engagement with the power of mark making and expressive drawing materials to explore a range of concepts. Christie
At Translating Vitalities this year I wanted to complete my ongoing explorations in…
“emotions as fluids”. Basically concerned with the question of how the notions of through-ness and the dance of agency might serve as counter-active powers to the vagaries of (human and bodily) fluid matter and temporality/finitude, I finally (after discussing with several other participants) ended up with a strict close-reading of 17th century Chinese medical notions on the emotions…The spirit of serious scholarly and artistic concentration paired with respect and determination was there in every single moment of this week. This is what I also brought home to my academic life/to know that through-ness can work. Angelika
Vitalities and Through-ness (通tong) research…
was formed by the groups’ engagement with through-ness and the porcelain lithophane that was my central form with which to cause disruption and respite within this dialogue. Clare
What I brought to the workshop was…
a proposal to do some “fictioning” with my current book project on the history of anatomy and the body in modern China… Late in the week I led a session reading two translations of poems written by Chinese anatomy students in the 1930s, and eight comrades joined to give their impressions and feedback… I cannot imagine a more productive week or a more supportive group of people for this project. David
This was my first time with Translating Vitalities Collective, and…
I went in with an agenda: to try my hand at storytelling bees around Islamic metaphysics. This is a project that I care for deeply but also the kind of endeavor that keeps me on the cusp of despair: not only because the vanishing bees are foreshadowing the precarious future of our worlds. But also because most of the tools of my academic trade seem poorly fitting for the task. So offered “honey” for tasting because honey seems the most vital of substances and proposed “tasting” in order to ground the metaphysical into a prepositional trial and sensuous experiences that everyone can relate to, even the clever skeptics who think metaphysics is merely a fancy word. Larissa
An emergent conversation…
about the importance of storytelling seemed so potentially productive that we will be meeting again in 2019 to continue the conversation around that theme. Carla
Translating Vitalities 