On translation

What does it mean to translate?
Not just between languages, but between places, voices, and ways of knowing?

Translation is not perfection.
It’s negotiation. It’s building bridges that hold.

And when the subject is home [the place you grew up, the people you belong to] translation becomes even more complex.
As Moroccan anthropologist Hassan Rachik writes, working “at home” as a researcher means
being too close to be distant, too familiar to be neutral.
Translator and betrayer. Traduttore, traditore.
Trust has to be earned.

We’ve learned to translate everyday life:
between practice and imagination,
between silence and speech,
between architecture and those who live it.

Translation isn’t literal.
It’s respect.
It’s the attempt to speak with, not over.

In Fez’s medina, the space between things is almost palpable:
between old and new, between lived memory and projected futures.

We moved through these in-between spaces
– from maps to poetry, from memory to performance –
guided by voices that challenge architecture’s limits:
as a discipline, as a power structure, as a language.

What stays with us is not a definition, but a feeling:
that the real work lies between.
Between disciplines. Between scales. Between certainties.
Between what we inherit, and what we choose to carry forward.

Fez, August 2025
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« L’aspect du monde pour nous serait bouleversé si nous réussissions à voir comme choses
les intervalles entre les choses. »

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961 | Philosopher)