The transposing illustrator: Challenges and opportunities meeting the authorial illustrator that interacts, documents and bears witness of the unrepresented and the non-representable

Abstract

What could be gained by exploring transposition as critical framework for illustration? Obviously, there was always the possibility of adapting narration from one semiotic text to another. In times of structural injustice, war and migration, what may be the contribution from the field of illustration? May the illustrator’s transposition lead to a more nuanced storytelling beyond the ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomy? The ambition behind the artistic research project ‘Illuminating the non-representable’ was to be a laboratory for testing the definitions of illustration and illumination and to create a companionship of affirmative ethics Braidotti refers to. Challenges in illustrating the Holocaust have been a central topic in the project.