Translation Workshop: House of Half Ideas

In this session, participants work with a text where testimony, memory, and language intertwine. Through acts of mistranslation and sonic experimentation, we explore how words can tremble, fracture, and carry what resists being said.

House of Half Ideas
with Yara Mekawei und Kenan Khadaj
Curatorial Statement

House of Half Ideas is a curatorial collective shaped by porous boundaries, open questions, and the radical potential of what remains unfinished. We don’t begin with answers. We begin with a feeling, a fragment, a conversation that refuses to end. Our practice unfolds at the intersection of literature, visual art, and political thought, not as a tidy convergence of disciplines, but as a field of tensions, echoes, and unexpected kinships.

We believe that curating is an act of listening. To what has been silenced, to what resists translation, to what arrives late or not at all. Our work moves with the rhythms of exile, of memory, of voices that speak from below. We are drawn to the stories that don’t quite fit, the gestures that linger, the artworks and texts that refuse to be pinned down.

House of Half Ideas bridges visual art with literature as a way of making meaning differently. A poem can move like a piece of performance. A painting can carry the weight of a sentence long suppressed. We invite these forms to speak to each other, not to resolve, but to reveal new ways of seeing and feeling.

Our programs—whether readings, exhibitions, gatherings, or conversations—are guided by a poetics of relation. We resist the need to explain everything. Instead, we trust in resonance, in complexity, in the slow unfolding of understanding. We curate as a form of care. Not to organize or complete, but to hold space for what is still becoming.

Collaboration is not just a method for us. It is a practice of being with others. We work closely with artists, writers, and thinkers who challenge and transform us, who bring their own lineages and struggles into the room. Together, we ask: What does it mean to share a world? What does it take to make space for each other’s ghosts and desires?

In a time when everything demands clarity and performance, House of Half Ideas chooses vulnerability. We are interested in the unfinished, the imperfect, the poetic. We believe there is power in the half-said, in the mistranslated, in the questions that keep returning.

This is where we begin. Not with certainty, but with care, with curiosity, and with the quiet belief that from what is not yet whole, something true can still emerge.