AGAINST THE PLAYBOOK: Public Intimacy

Across texts, objects, and gestures, Public Intimacy traces solidarity as something enacted through small, vulnerable acts: a phrase, a shirt, a postcard, a sentence passed from one language to another. When words move across languages, they do not arrive unchanged. They carry histories, connotations, and affect; they are felt, trusted, or resisted differently depending on where and how they land. Solidarity spoken in one’s own language can feel intimate and grounding, while in another it may feel exposed, formal, or surveilled. It names a shared closeness forged under conditions of exposure.

When bodies move across borders, exist under neo-colonial violence, and when language travels unevenly, at work, in protest, in the newspapers, care becomes a collective act. Articulated through colonial languages, solidarity is filtered through structures of power: some words are legitimised, others flattened, misread, or stripped of their force. Translation here is never neutral. It carries not only meaning, but emotion, memory, and risk. Intimacy takes the form of proximity: witnessing, accompanying, holding, and staying with one another in the open.

Language is central to this encounter; it acts as both a barrier and a bridge. To speak, translate, or repeat are inherently political acts. Words are carried across tongues not only to be understood, but to be believed. Translation becomes a site of risk and insistence, where meaning fractures, where some words resist flattening, and where others are policed or lose their resonance. It is also a site of collective imagination; one that refuses isolation, demands presence, and holds open the possibility of being together, even when language fails.