Translation is often seen as a practical tool—a means to an end in political summits, on street signs, and within the migration experience. It journeys through meaning, promising clarity, yet often eluding full comprehension.

Louder Than Words invites a re-defining of translation. The selected works linger in the cracks of the translation process, where new meanings and feelings emerge, and histories shapeshift or break open. These moments become peepholes into lifeworlds—sometimes flattened into ‘points of view’ yet expanding into portals for less-documented realities. Whether navigating cognitive dissonance while living overseas, re-examining connotations, reclaiming agency and stolen land, or grappling with abundance/scarcity of language/silence, these works run deep.

Beyond the transfer of words, translation carries the weight of cultures, emotions, and histories. However, when it breaks down, it resembles an institutional archive: preserving a particular story while shadowing what remains unsaid. There is a bank of words available in a language, just like a box of objects comprising an archive. But what is left unarticulated—the consequences of political violence and censorship, the context of a life, time, and place, the soul of a being—is what translation and the archive share, in negation/absence/elusion.

Louder Than Words colors these concerns through linguistic and cinematic modes of translation. It focuses on the fractures, and universes within our mis-, dis -, or non- translation of each other. The selection figures the works as endeavors in rewriting, reclaiming, returning, reorienting, associating, and deepening what lies on the surface.

Nour El Helou is a Lebanese cultural worker, film programmer, and writer curious about the ways we relate to each other.

With moving image works by Mona Benyamin, Joe Namy, Maissa Maatouk, Zahra Moein, Somar Yahya, Jonelle Twum, S Emsaki, José De Sancristóbal, Basma Al Sharif, and Razan Al Salah.