Multimodal Tasks for Translators: A Translational Dialogue with Cia Rinne and Her Work

Angela Kölling is professor for anglophone studies in the Department of Translation, Language and Cultural Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Her research focuses on the literatures of the South Pacific and their connections to the global north and representations of lived climate change in particular. Her previous research projects include book fairs as public relations grounds for translators / world literature on the road and creative non-fiction as littérature engagée. Her most recent publication considers creative interventions in academic knowledge production as forms of critical engagement with ethnographic material in decolonial settings.

Cia Rinne is a poet, author and artist living in Berlin. Born in Gothenburg, she grew up in Germany and studied philosophy and languages in Frankfurt, Helsinki and Athens. Her multilingual minimalist texts play with the phonetic shifts of meaning between languages and reduce complex philosophical and linguistic questions to tonal sequences. Her books have been published in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France, Switzerland and Canada, most recently L’Usage du mot (2017), Sentences (2018), and I am Very Miserable About Sentences (2019). Her performances, exhibitions and sound installations have been shown in galleries and museums such as Den Frie and Overgaden in Copenhagen, Signal in Malmö, the KUMU Art Museum in Tallinn, Weserburg Bremen, the CNEAI in France and at INCA Seattle. Her sound work leçon du mot [le son du mot] (made in collaboration with Sebastian Eskildsen) premiered in the Glyptothek of Copenhagen in 2018. For an opera by Henrik Strindberg and Sofia Jernberg premiering at the Royal Opera in Copenhagen in November 2019, Cia wrote the libretto (Trial&Eros). Cia is a laureate of the Prix littéraire Bernard Heidsieck–Centre Pompidou 2019.