In Twenty Theses on Translation (2006), translation theorist Emily Apter sought to delineate the contours of translation as a process within the broader framework of comparative literature. This statement affirms a conceptual shift toward radical translatability: “everything is translatable.” However, in a notable reversal seven years later, Apter lamented that “world literature… seems fundamentally untranslatable” (Apter, xi–xii). This turn has had far-reaching implications in both comparative literature and global cultural translation. More than a mere observation on the evolution of translation as a mode of cultural transmission in the postmodern era, Apter’s remark allegorizes the frictions of the global capitalist market and cosmopolitanism—a key term of post-millennial innovation—standing in stark contrast to parochialism and nationalist cultural enclosure. This conceptual reversal underscores the paradoxical tension of translation under globalization: it functions simultaneously as a bridge to the Other and a site of estrangement and rupture. It is precisely within this context that the artistic practice of Cainy Yiru Yan emerges as a sensuous and resonant response to this semiotic drift.
On April 1st, 2025, at 6:00 PM London time, artist Cainy Yiru Yan staged a cross-media performance at the Performance Studio of the Royal College of Music, engaging with philosophical themes of presence and absence through an interdisciplinary assemblage of sound, image installation, and classical string quartet performanceThis event was not only an experiment in spatial and acoustic media but also a ritualized reconfiguration of sacred semantics through technological translation.
Through a combination of sensory-based methods, Cainy transformed the ruins of religious architecture into an audible vocabulary, reactivating spatial memory and ritual temporality within the post-digital condition. This gesture does not constitute a mere technological reproduction; rather, it represents a material elegy for sanctity and the “unwritten,” an aesthetic exploration that poetically traverses the liminal space.
This performance constitutes only one project within the larger cross-media art series ELEGIES OF SANCTITY. Across the series, Cainy probes the double theme of the seduction and reconfiguration of sacred space, shifting the focus away from doctrinal religiosity toward the mechanisms by which spatial spirituality is reconstructed. In this reimagining, sacred space is no longer confined to physical locations like churches or abbeys; instead, it hovers within postmodern structures of mobility as a “floating field”—a temporary, techno-spiritual domain activated through digital coding. The title itself, Elegies of Sanctity, bears conceptual weight. An “elegy” is traditionally a poetic or musical form written in mourning for death or loss. In Western literary convention, it encompasses both genre and affect—an act of remembering, lamenting, and emotionally connecting with an irretrievable past. Hence, “elegies” in this context refer to works composed in response to a certain cultural or spiritual loss. Crucially, “sanctity” in the series does not denote a specific religious object but instead invokes the abstraction of “the sacred itself,” a transcendental, untouchable realm of religious experience. As Walter Benjamin has written on the spectral nature of modernity(Benjamin, 2006), we now inhabit a time of “inoperative sanctity,” in which the sacred no longer functions as an authoritative truth domain but as something performed, deconstructed, remembered, and simulated. Cainy’s intervention into sites once considered sacred—through sensory and technological means—attempts to amplify and retranslate this condition of loss through cross-media translation. In this sense, the transformation of “sanctity” into “elegy” is not merely an act of mourning, but a re-creation through technological means. ELEGIES OF SANCTITY can thus be read as a poetic lament for sacred experiences that have been lost, are vanishing, or resist articulation altogether. It functions both as a spatial elegy and as a cultural preservation ritual, reactivating untranslatable, irreproducible, and irretrievable fragments of sanctity through the mediating forces of technology and sensory language.
Moreover, in Cainy’s practice, space no longer operates as a static architectural container but becomes a composite vessel of memory, resonance, disappearance, and mourning. In other words, space is no longer a tangible, present environment but an ideological affect—pervasive, mobile, and symbolic. As Joana Jacob Ramalho (2025) proposes in Memory and the Gothic Aesthetic in Film, the interaction between bodies and environments forms what she calls a “tactile sphere, (Ramalho, 189)” wherein the sensory connection between body and physical space transforms spatial environments into metaphysical vessels of memory. In Cainy’s series, architectural fragments eroded by nature—weathered bas-reliefs, fractured column bases, and silent cracks in stone floors—are scanned at sub-millimeter resolution and acoustically restructured into the semantic texture of a string quartet. In this process, sound functions not only as an auditory supplement but as a new translational language, replacing dead tongues and lost religious iconography. This is not simply an act of historical lamentation; it also gestures toward a potential spiritual modality in the posthuman era. In this creative framework, “translation” operates not only in the conventional sense of interlingual or textual conversion. As Roman Jakobson (1959/2012) has argued, this should instead be understood as intersemiotic translation—a transmutation across sign systems. Here, translation becomes an epistemological mechanism of manifestation—transforming ruins into frequencies, visual remnants into sonic fields, and silent sanctuaries into nomadic digital spirits.
Cainy Yiru Yan’s ELEGIES OF SANCTITY series constitutes a complex and exploratory cross-media framework through which sanctity is re-materialized and reinterpreted via technological means. Within the context of digital culture, Cainy articulates an aesthetic of “nomadic religiosity”—a sensory form that transcends territorial, architectural, and institutional boundaries. Indeed, Cainy’s work demonstrates an ambition to traverse the threshold between built space and affective memory, challenging the historical embeddedness of sanctity and proposing a new technological infrastructure for cultural mourning. At present, the work leans heavily toward affective atmospherics while lacking an explicit critique of theological or cultural-political registers.
Similarly, while Cainy’s response to the problem of “untranslatability” is aesthetically compelling, it does not yet offer a systematic intervention into this concept across comparative literature, religious semiotics, or the digital humanities. Furthermore, while the series posits a technologically-mediated form of sacred experience, it leaves underexamined the ideological conditions and media ethics implicit in such technospiritual constructs. In a sensory world built from algorithms, scans, and datasets, how can one avoid the re-mystification of technology itself? How might one resist the risk of “spirituality” becoming reified within quantifiable systems? These are urgent and complex questions that the series might engage with more critically in future iterations. In sum, ELEGIES OF SANCTITY offers a promising poetics-technics framework that generates meaningful dialogue between technological translation and sacred spatiality.
Yet its critical potential would be further enhanced by deeper reflection on the symbolic codes of religion and a more robust engagement with the reflexive mechanisms of post-technological aesthetics. Through the constructive act of “mourning sanctity,” Cainy’s work not only responds to Benjaminian specters of modernity but also poses an aesthetic counterpoint to the global cultural discourse on untranslatability. Her practice transcends traditional religious narratives and architectural fixity, transforming elegy into a poetic mode of perception—an attempt to summon defunct sanctity through media, and a ritual that reweaves ruin, sensation, memory, and spirit into a new cultural topology.
Emily Apter. 2006. Twenty Theses on Translation, in The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. xi–xii.
Jakobson, Roman. “On the Linguistic Aspects of translation” in The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti. 3rd ed. London, New York: Routledge, (1959/2012), 126-131.
Ramalho, Joana Jacob. Memory and the Gothic aesthetic in film. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025.
