In June 2015 The LFTT Library embarks on The LFTT Library Translation Tour, a 4,000km road-trip and practical exercise in cross-country re-interpretation. In collaboration with a number of artists including Angelika Höger (Artists Unlimited, Bielefeld Germany), Aga Tamiola (Berlin) and Carla Bertola and Alberto Vitacchio (Turin) The LFTT library will expand on it’s meaning potential by opening itself up to ‘foreign’ readings. How will a library soaked in Irish culture be perceived by these diverse cultural perspectives? Is it possible that an Irish audience might better approach The LFTT Library material as something ‘once removed’ from their own local history.

A specially curated selection of the library has been made for each location. At Artists Unlimited, Bielefeld, Angelika Höger has requested books from the natural sciences, gardening, practical instruction manuals and new age self help guides which together form a kind of cultural ‘how-to’. The project asks; How do personal and local differences effect this idea of the universal ‘manual’? How do we overcome such things as simple language barriers; are technologies like google translate enough to bridge the gap, or is something more like a real time conversation required? Is there really only one way of understanding ‘how-to’?

At the Schloss Summer Salon, The LFTT Library will collaborate with artist Aga Tamiola (PL) whose specialism is endangered languages and how the loss of indigenous language effect a cultures self perception. The project run by Yale University Alumni is part of a larger movement to revive salon culture as a sociable form of knowledge sharing. Aga Tamiola and LFTT Library director, Helen Horgan will engage the public in a series of prescribed actions which invite subjective deviation in ‘reading’ the LFTT Library books. Finally at The Room, Turin the renowned visual poets Carla Bertola and Alberto Vitacchio have made a selection including world dictionaries and writings on irish pilgrimages as well as foreign travel, to challenge the cultural problematic of material and linguistic ‘translation’ in a playfully literal sense.

The Schloss Warten, Brandenburg DE

Participants at each locations are invited to become part of ‘The LFTT Library Tour: Film in Translation’, the ongoing film document of the tour, by contributing ‘misreadings’ and ‘mistranslations’ stemming from the alien content of the newly re-contextualised books. Interested participants are invited to select from the library short texts which exhibit curious difficulties in understanding, whether stemming from language barriers or locally found confusions.  These texts/confusions will be worked on and transformed together with the artists, becoming part of the narrative of the film as a document of ‘translation in action’. The LFTT Library leaves Cork on the June 6th 2015, more posts to follow. Kindly supported by Culture Ireland.