Workshop Origin: A round trip

Bring anything written by you in your native language. It could be poetry, notes, short stories or even an unsent letter. anything you have always wanted to share but language barriers have been stopping you. We try to translate ourselves and understand each other's translations.

Recursive Origins is an artistic research project that explores self-translation as a recursive process of creation, interpretation, and transformation. Rather than understanding translation as the transfer of meaning from one language to another, the workshop approaches it as an ongoing dialogue between authors, readers, and languages. Through repeated cycles of translation, feedback, and revision, participants investigate how texts evolve, how meanings shift, and how new possibilities emerge.

The workshop combines artistic practice with linguistic inquiry, inviting participants toexperience self-translation not as the production of a final version, but as an open-endedprocess of discovery.

Participants
The workshop is free

The workshop is open to speakers of all languages, including native Dutch and English speakers. Each participant brings a short text written in their mother tongue—such as a poem, short story, essay, personal writing, song lyrics, or any other authored text—and produces a self- translation into English, Dutch, or both.

Workshop Process

Participants create a self-translation using any resources they find useful, including dictionaries, machine translation, AI language models, or other language tools.

The translated texts are then shared with the group. Participants—particularly native speakersof Dutch and English—respond to the translations by describing what they understand, imagine, or experience. The emphasis is placed on interpretation rather than linguistic correctness.

Authors compare these responses with their original intentions and decide whether to revise the translation, rewrite the original text, or begin another cycle of self-translation. Each iteration becomes part of an ongoing creative and research process.

Mahsa is an Iranian poet. She has published her poems in Farsi and English. You can find her works in Spellbinder magazine, Encyclopedia Prismatica, Analytic Room and Baang.