From Substitution to Co-presence: Translation, Memory, Trace and the Visual Practices of Diasporic Italian Artists

The essay examines how female artists working in the context of Italian American and Italian Australian communities use gendered practices, images, and objects to construct a visual genealogy of migration that reminds us of its roots not just in trauma but also in desire. Their work embraces metaphorical as well as material forms of translation to invoke the double-edged nature of migration and of its memory: the ability to look towards the future while maintaining the threads that link us to our past. Their creative practices substantiate a vision of translation which refutes fixed binary models based on notions of substitution and replacement, pointing instead towards the dynamic processes that allow us to travel, migrate, self-translate, while actively constructing individual and collective narratives that insist on continuity and co-presence. Translation, then, acts not as a form of erasure but as a trace, testifying to and making visible the tension between continuity and discontinuity that lies at the heart of transnational experiences and transcultural narratives.