What do you, Lord Byron & Homer have in common? If you attend this residency, that you have all forged works of art by the air of the Ionion Sea.

Eliot Weinberger has said, “Translation is change and motion; literature dies when it stays the same, when it has no place to go.” In his book, Transient Worlds, United States Poet Laureate Arthur Sze regards translation as a “vehicle” that helps us “awaken to the possibilities—and expand the resources—of our shared language.” This residency seeks to unleash the action of translation, by inviting emerging and established bilingual writers and visual artists across the globe, to embrace the dynamic and expansive nature of translation in a 7-day interdisciplinary, collaborative literary program in the Greek island of Kefalonia.

Hosted at the Ionion Center for Culture & Arts, this program will investigate three ways that the vehicle of translation can be used: to archive collective memory, to bridge cultures, and to cross and bend genres. The first half of the program prioritizes generative off-sites in archaeological and culturally significant landmarks such as: Lord Byron’s Rock, the neighboring island of Ithaca and the Mycenaean Tombs of Makarata. The second half of the program focuses on consolidating our exploration into three material takeaways: a collaborative art installation (whole cohort work), a group translation project (in pairs or threes), and personal genre-experimentation work (individual).

The program will culminate in a collaborative zine and performance showcase to demonstrate the rich dialogue forged across languages, cultures and mediums; evidence of translation’s capacity to go beyond the linguistic into a multisensory, multilingual and multidisciplinary encounter. This program is particularly aligned with the Ionion Center's mission of fostering international cooperation, academic exchange, and community-based artistic practice.