Translations and traps

Abstract This article explores curatorial practice as a form of non-textual cultural translation when developed in collaboration with Indigenous Amazonian material practices, and examines the methodological, political and ontological implications of such an approach. Drawing on translation studies, decolonial thought and multispecies anthropology, it considers exhibitions as mediations, contact zones and traps that hold open the frictions, asymmetries and semiotic densities shaping encounters between heterogeneous worlds. Rather than presuming a seamless translation of Indigenous practices into contemporary art spaces, the article analyses the tensions, limits and untranslatabilities that arise when relational, territorial and more-than-human knowledges enter exhibitionary regimes grounded in Western classificatory logics. Through ethnographic examples, curatorial case studies and collaborative fieldwork, it examines material practices — such as fishing traps — as semiotic architectures that translate rivers, forests, animal behaviours, and celestial cycles into form. It argues for a speculative, decolonial curatorial translation attentive to more-than-human semiosis, foregrounding opacity, friction, and relational attunement as conditions for non-extractive world-making.