TRANSLATING KUIR MAGAZINE

1. CORDIALITY AS TERRITORY
It may come as a surprise that the first concept explored in this chronicle of what was done
and said during the “Translating Kuir” encounters is that of cordiality. A term in disuse that
is rescued from oblivion every so often and, usually, for the purposes of irony. Cordiality is a
vintage gesture. At least in Argentina –from where I write – the term already belongs to last
century’s archive of permissible words, of sinisterly incorrect words, or of those words that
can no longer be trusted. The “cordial relationship” belongs, for example, to the set of good
manners and, even worst, to the set of useful advice doled out by the self-help industry, which
aims to preserve good manners in order to ensure the customer “is always right”, even though
that rightness is not to please him but to keep him captive. Precisely because of this narrow
association with a second-rate capitalist ethics, cordiality is not talked about much anymore,
even less so within the context of cultural criticism, of art, of activism.
However, as I watch these meetings with the task of producing a record that will capture what
was said beyond the material of “pure truth” or “uncut truth” that digital devices provide, the
meaning of “cordiality” suddenly returns with its intact and imprecise etymology: from heart!
Heartbeats Cannot Be Translated
And here is where the originality of this case resides: cordiality has appeared within these three
meeting not as a sales strategy but, instead, as a condition of possibility: because if we are in
different countries, if we have lived experiences that are similars but unlabelable, if we take
a position towards art and the ways in which it relates to activism that does not necessarily
coincide with the positions of others nor with what we ourselves may think some days, the point
of these encounters cannot be a territory, a nation, not even a language. Nor can it be reached
with a word enshrined in the dictionary nor in local slangs!
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