There was Once a West

The late director Sergio Leone, titled his famous Western C'era una Volta il West. In English, the translation is "There was Once West," but the film's American distributor chose to change the English title to, Once Upon a Time in the West, which is fitting with the sentiment in the original Italian. The differences between these phrases, the movement from the Italian to the English, is a turn through the "poetic" - beyond language, yet evinced through one's idea of culture—each alone evokes a beginning, yet their togetherness generates other meaning, and this coupling tells more about the "West," than either phrase on its own.

A question emerges, Where is culture? And continues, Where is time? There is movement.

Territory is mythical, so perhaps a new journal might be a "myth" (one with stakes and claims), or a chain letter of sorts, in collusion with other journals. Instead of "curating" the translations and transactions that enact territory with specific dominances over space and ideas, this first issue might include a proposition to seek-out other printed projects. Shark, Metronome, Victoria, Continuous Project, Cabinet… Where in time do journals meet? There is movement. The diffusion of readers and regions, circulation, is also the dissemination of time. As time relinquishes a cohesive point of view, one that "territorializes" some critical juncture, we may recognise a lack of consensus. This is perhaps a place to begin.

In San Sebastian last spring, I entered into a conversation on a bus with a Spanish translator. He told me that in Spain, each American film actor has a Spanish voice-actor who dubs all his roles. The "foreign" voice inevitably becomes associated with the actor, more than his own, to the point where it may be employed as a voice-over in advertisements that do not include the actor's image. The voice is the (absent) actor to which the dubbed voice "belongs." The exception is James Bond. Here, the same voice-actor is cast for every James Bond actor, from Connery to Brosnan. In other films, Sean Connery's body returns to its regular voice-double.

There is an aspect of foreignness, of living in other places, that continually seeks the day when one will find "home." When the foreign place will be more familiar than the place we left behind. A displaced nostalgia—a longing for a past rather than for the past. In a time where art works physically travel more than ever between regions, between publics, between "international" biennials, mega-exhibitions, and art fairs, a question emerges, What is lost in the translation? And continues… In a crisis of curating, we discover artworks in far-off regions and respond by placing them together. We respond by speaking English with foreign accents. We respond by asking where is representation, where is institution, where is memory, where is power?

An alternative proposition: Find movement, shifts in meaning, breaks in continuity, poetic "misses." To ask where is movement is to ask where is dissent. To ask where is movement is to ask where is engagement. To ask where is movement is to ask where is time.

(Sarah Pierce, "There was Once a West", introduction to Printed Project Issue 1, ed. Sarah Pierce, with contributions from Matthew Buckingham, Gerard Byrne, Pip Day, Peter Fend, Bettina Funcke, Wendy Judge, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Aleksandra Mir, Asier Pérez, Alan Phelan, Rachel Price, Issa Samb, Simon Sheikh and Grant Watson. Published by VAI: Dublin 2003)