Initially I made a film in Rome inspired by accounts of the process, known as a ‘translatio’ by which, in the 9th Century, sacred relics (bones, clothes and implements) were removed from catacombs in the outlying necropolis and transported into the city walls to be installed in the altars of basilicas. For my ‘translatio’ I carried an abandoned washing machine – a domestic relic – for two miles from St Helen’s catacomb along Via Labicana/ Casilina to just inside the city wall at Porta Maggiore. This performance was filmed from a van containing a small invited audience which, locked in the one-way traffic system, managed to pass by me every 5 minutes or so over the 1 hour walk. The camera thus became a satellite ‘eye’ to the one suggested by the cyclopean door of the washing machine on my back. As the camera moves with the traffic it seeks me out as a perspective point, the city becoming revealed and exposed around it. On the street, some people studiously ignored me whilst others gawped at my mock-heroic feat (the washing machine was gutted of all contents and wasn’t too heavy).

Back in England, I attempted to ‘translate’ this short film against the background of London. The washing machine was ‘mistranslated’ into a wheel, the performance re-set along the Roman Road in the East End, and whereas in Rome I was filmed from inside a circling van, the camerawork in London was made on a bicycle and on foot. Accuracy of rendition into the ‘translation’ became submerged into a visual-pidgin or ‘lingua franca’.

Further, whereas the footage in Rome shows me walking mainly from right to left of the screen, in the London film I am moving in the opposite direction. The two films have been edited and placed alongside each other to suggest that the two figures are walking symmetrically towards and away from the membrane between the two frames. Perhaps then, these roughly choreographed / edited passages might suggest a visual-spatial analogy of the inevitable lacunae of symmetry between two languages, widening and closing as they flank the would-be translator.