Zakariyah Amataya

Process Note

This early piece is where my intersemiotic method first becomes intentional rather than intuitive. I worked with Cece Nobre to create a portrait of Zakariyah through an intersemiotic translation—Cece read my translation but also got to meet and talk to Zakariyah on site. We were together during the painting.

This was an attempt to give more depth to the work we were translating in Verse Junkies by moving it into another medium and letting that medium generate its own constraints. Footage of Cece painting the portrait became part of the final video rendering of the poem in translation, so the collaboration isn't decorative; it's structural evidence of the relay: poem → constraint record → visual translation → filmed process → finished video.

I also worked with Eye of Seasons to score this piece, and it was our first attempt at scoring poetry translations. I approached the source not as "material" to adapt but as an originating act with obligations—semantic commitments, internal stresses, and a lived context that couldn't be replaced by aesthetic coherence.

The workflow began with a plain record of what I could name and defend (what must be carried forward), then moved into collaborative making where those constraints had to survive translation through other people's hands. That collaboration forced clarity: I had to articulate why certain pressures mattered, what kinds of departures were permissible, and how to keep the resulting work answerable to its source instead of merely "inspired by" it.

The most important outcome here is procedural: translation as a chain of decisions that stays legible, where each stage produces a new version without breaking accountability to the initiating text.