Translating Moscow Conceptualism

This contribution explores the key principles that have guided me in the publications, media documentations, and exhibitions on Moscow conceptualism I have realised in the West German context since the first half of the 1980s. In this personal recollection, I reflect on my work as a translator, editor, video documentarist, and curator. I ask how these various activities in a transnational context are linked to archival practices, in particular to processes of preservation, selection, and canonisation on the one hand, and to attempts at creating new forms of institutional self-organisation on the other. In this respect, I am concerned with different dimensions of translation: literary translation, translation of performance events into documentation, and translation of this documentation into an exhibition context that contributes to the formation of an archive. Last but not least, questions of media archives are discussed: how the specific media and performance-based forms of conceptual literature and art in samizdat can be passed on from generation to generation; forms presupposing the storage and collection not only of written texts but also of sound and video documents beyond the Gutenberg culture of book printing.