Dreaming a Language without Separation: Queer Quantum Translation in Emilia Beatriz’s barrunto (2024)

This paper explores how Emilia Beatriz’s debut feature-length film barrunto proposes an alternative model of connection and communication through its exploration and reimagination of language. A work of speculative fiction, barrunto enacts a 70-minute-long translation of the titular word. This translation takes in multiple realities, from Puerto Rico to Scotland to Uranus, which coexist simultaneously and come together in what reviewer Justine Smith calls the film’s ‘interdisciplinary (or interplanetary) plea to reimagine a world unbound by the invisible but violent threads that currently hold it together’ (2024).

I argue that this translation occurs through interconnected movements of unworlding and entanglement in a process which is both quantum (in Karen Barad’s sense) and queer (drawing on Jack Halberstam’s theory of unworlding). Though language initially appears a kind of epistemological anchor for audiences, as subtitles apparently make sense of visual and auditory indeterminacy, closer attention to Beatriz’s use of subtitles reveals a subversive approach. Rejecting conventions of representationalism, Beatriz’s use of subtitles creates affective experiences of overwhelm where any sense of language as describing a singular reality is lost. Language’s pluralising potential is made more explicit in the film’s engagement with translation. Working with translation scholar Delphine Grass’s notion of ‘transtopias,’ which mobilise the creative energies of translation to propose ‘new forms of being-in-the-world’ (2023: 46), I go on to suggest that unworlding and entanglement come together in the process of translation which the film enacts, and argue that this process understands translation’s transformative potential as quantum and queer. I conclude that in enacting this queer, quantum process of translation, the film mounts a substantial critique of the Western

epistemological limits Beatriz evokes in their reflections on the film (2024), and proposes instead an alternative vision of a world and a reality built around openness, community, and connection