This video-diary describes and performs an act of translation.

What are we attempting to translate?

Dark possibilities into bright. Theory into life. Life into theory. The written into the visual.

This short film – the first in a series – is an attempt to capture fragments of a reading project that emerged from a disenchantment with critical theory. As we tried to trace out a post-critical legal hermeneutics, we found ourselves on a journey through texts that inhabited hope, that concretized the utopian. We did so in a year where hope and utopia were particularly difficult to glimpse. By journey’s end, we returned home to critical theory, even as we found its universe of possibilities had expanded. 

André Dao and Danish Sheikh are PhD candidates at Melbourne Law School and members of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities.