body-territory:liquid-memory 

body-territory:liquid-memory delves into the intricate processes of storytelling and translanguaging, culminating in the realm of AI. It aims to understand the emergence of other realities and transformations during translation while exploring different layers of reality, what endures, and the remains of the “original” body and memory.

The piece focuses on translating stories and feelings on memory and territory shared by migrant bodies in Berlin. Specifically, it delves into the stories of migrants from different territories – Syria, Malaysia, Korea, Iran, Mexico – living in Berlin, intertwined with two bodies of water that have been part of the city for centuries: Plötzensee and the Karpfenteich pond.

Through text, drawings, figures, and field and voice recordings in relation, the piece captures the memories and stories of these bodies, translating them into sound by using diverse interfaces. And then also processing this sound conveying the essence of shared experiences into other sonic translations and interpretations. 

Migrants were intentionally selected as storytellers, resonating with the migrating waters of the lake and pond, carrying ancient narratives, some of human violence, inflicted upon the body-territory-liquid-memory. Formed in the last glacial era, the Plötzensee lake lives near the Plötzensee ex-prison where many “recruited” people, especially women were assassinated in the 30’-40’s. And the Karpfenteich pond, witness to the 1896 German colonial world exhibit, holder of stories of resistance and refusal against racism and exploitation.

Memories and relation tied to the lake and pond were translated into sound pieces through an ongoing project called “Fluid Ecotonalism” – a collaborative, poetic & transversal proposal translating relation and feeling between liquid ecotones through expanded sound. For these, the human body was the bridge to translation. Ecosomatic workshops involving listening, drawing, movement, and voice led to the creation of collective scores interpreted by musician and composer Mauricio Silva Orendain into sound pieces using fluXpad – an app that converts form to sound, and where we traced the scores with timbers created from field recordings during the workshops – and DAW.

This proposal extended to translating the stories of five migrant humans using text2wav, a meta AI public notebook made to utilize MuisicGen in extensive formats shared by the duo Hypereikon. The migrants who wrote their stories and memories are beautiful beings-veins I met at a previous workshop on translanguaging together – Qila Gill, Ƶain Saleh, Cassie Jiun Seo and Tara Habibƶadeh. With their permission and collaboration, fragments of their texts were converted to wav; resulting in variations between humans, the internet, and the AI’s translations.

The aim is to converge all translations – lake, pond, and people – into a unified language: sound. Sound, diasporic yet together, fluid and influenced by perception, becomes a bridge connecting diverse realities. Always abstract and open to possibility. Each listener also experiences the stories differently, adding to their essence and fostering connections with others through listening. 

To conclude this translanguaging experiment, the sound pieces went through further processing with Semilla, a neural audio synthesizer utilizing latent space seeding created and applied by Hexorcismos. This final translation into AI technology was a significant milestone – representing the digital dimension in its “less earthly” and more machine-media-vortex form. The resulting translations from Semilla were then heard by a group of human individuals, to together return to translations through the body-memory in the realms of text, forms, and feeling…

The project explores what endures after numerous translations through various interfaces, navigating a rapidly changing rhythm fueled by perceptions and information overload. What persists from the body-territory-liquid-memory? What emerges from each interpretation and translation across different forms?

Through this multi-layered exploration, body-territory:liquid-memory invites us to question and reflect upon the complexities of translation, language, memory, and the fluid nature of storytelling in our present world. 

When remembering, the memory carries other memories. When feeling a body, the body carries other bodies. These relations give birth to the sound we perceive. Sound is present-past-future.