Drawing the Dispute: Translating Speech to Image

Abstract

What happens when a dispute becomes a drawing? In this participatory practice-sharing, we worked in pairs with archival court cases. These records describe "disputed objects" - items that lack agreed-upon authorship, ownership, or copyright and were subject to legal proceedings. They are drawn from my ongoing collaborative research project with Agency VZW in Brussels: founded in 2019 by artist Kobe Matthys (1970–2023) and collaborators, Agency uses legal cases on copyrights, patents, and trademarks as research material to explore how intellectual property law shapes artistic practice, ideas of ownership, and the boundaries between nature and culture. In this participatory practice-sharing, which is essentially a drawing session, each person reads a case description aloud to their partner; the object itself remains absent and unseen. The listeners draw what they hear, then switch roles across multiple cases. The exercise functions simultaneously as a drawing class, an inquiry into the nature of translation and a tool for understanding the status of the "thing": Are we rendering the described artifact, the legal framing, the narrative voice, or our projection? Who owns the resulting drawing? Does this intersemiotic translation generate a new object and even a new author? Or does it simply multiply representations of a stable 'one'? After alternating different drawing practices (drawing while reading, drawing after a reading is finished, switching roles), participants were invited to reflect on the practice, their experience of translating, and the status of the drawing. During the discussion, I presented the further complication: a contract which they were invited to sign, titled "INTERSEMIOTIC TRANSLATION, CONTRIBUTION AND RIGHTS AGREEMENT", where the participants were asked to sign off their copyrights to me. This provocation opened the discussion further to think of the meaning of ownership and authority, and the emotional connection or lack of it in the face of our own creations, be they quickly done or with slow and meticulous labour.