Travelling Muses. Women, Ancient Grammars and Contemporary ARTivism in Refugees’ Tales

Abstract

This essay reflects on the issue of cultural translation as a ‘third space’, a site where, as Bhabha suggests, translation, decolonisation, and location or relocation are tied together (Bhabha, Rutherford 1990). A specific political stance is taken, and flexible critical tools – drawing on translation studies and cultural studies, migration studies, performance studies, visual studies, and film studies – are adopted to show some of the ways in which many contemporary artists have been trying to account for the risks, losses, difficulties, and hopes implied in forced migration. Within the context of the constant relocation that migrant people experience, the effort at developing a dialogic relationship between languages and cultures has been gradually shaping a ‘grammar’ of representation that is new but built on familiar signs and images. Particularly in the Mediterranean Sea, forced migration has been going on since ancient times, though the changes in its nature have multiplied the number of stranger-in-need, whatever their country of origin. The representation of the migrants of today through the alphabet provided by classical Greek literature is one of the strategies currently used in activist creative and political practices. It helps to translate the experience of migration adapting and reshaping stories that belong to the Western reservoir of myths and traditions and combining the creative drive with the need to be active in the political field. In what is currently defined ‘ARTivism’, the text/work of art becomes a political gesture and draws its meaning from a commitment to social justice (Pulitano 2022, pp. 1-21). The analysis that follows is primarily focused on two documentary films resulting from two theatrical experiences, both inspired by classical tragedies (Sophocles’s Antigone and Euripides’s The Trojan Women). It aims at showing how the blueprint offered by the classics builds up as a shared semiotic system connecting ancient Greece, contemporary Middle East, and the European audience of today.