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    • Life is Just a Bunch of Bargains and Mistranslations



    Life Is Just a Bunch of Bargains and Mistranslations     is a collaborative film, song and installation developed with participants from City of Sanctuary for Permindar Kaur’s Market Stalls project at Wolverhampton Art Gallery.

    The work began through conversations around language, music, markets and exchange. Kaur proposed the market stall structures, and these became a starting point for the project. Participants spoke many different languages, but one thing we quickly found we had in common was a love of music. I became interested in the way words moved between us, translated, misheard, repeated, corrected and reshaped. These small misunderstandings were not something to resolve or tidy away. They became part of the work.

    The title came out of the many philosophical conversations we had while meeting weekly at Wolverhampton Art Gallery. It refers to the mistranslations that happen in language, but also to the bargains and negotiations we make in order to make a home, build relationships and find our way through life. Bargaining carries a double meaning here. It is the familiar exchange of the marketplace, but also something more personal and structural. I often felt I was bargaining my own way through the making of the work, negotiating between the limitations of the project funding and my desire to create something genuinely relational. The repeated pull back towards the prescribed theme of markets was sometimes productive and sometimes confusing, and that tension also became part of the work.

    Participants talked about markets as places of noise, colour, fresh food, fabrics, different voices and constant negotiation. Phrases such as “How much?”, “Can you reduce the price?” and “The market is has nice cheap things” became part of a collectively written song. The lyrics travelled between English, Arabic, Turkish and Bengali, and then back again. Meaning shifted as the words moved between languages. We kept the awkward English because it carried the humour, rhythm and character of the language we were making together.

    Alongside the market material, we spent time listening to music and imagining landscapes connected to memory, home and places people might like to live. One participant spoke particularly strongly about mountains and sheep. I knew almost immediately that I wanted to use part of the material budget on something immaterial: a shared experience that might help bind us together within the relatively short time we had.

    This led to a group trip to the Long Mynd in Shropshire, where we walked, ate together, talked and filmed in the landscape. The trip became as important as anything we made in the gallery. At first, the mountain footage and the market song seemed disconnected. One had developed naturally through conversations and relationships, while the other came from the framework of the exhibition. Over time, that gap began to make sense. The picnic, the walk and the market were all concerned with similar things: food, exchange, conversation, movement, negotiation, hospitality and attempts to understand one another.

    The final work brings these elements together through a music video, a vinyl record and a market stall installation. Rather than treating the market stall simply as a literal subject, the work uses it as a structure for thinking about what gets exchanged when people meet: food, language, stories, music, humour, misunderstandings, care, and the small bargains involved in trying to belong.