Son[i]a #386
Lydia Ourahmane
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Image: Lydia Ourahmane "Barzakh", 2022. Courtesy of the artist
Lydia Ourahmane is an Algerian-born multidisciplinary artist who has spent much of her life in the UK. In her installations and interventions, the notions of object and subject—considered separate in Western thought—converge and dialogue between the public and private, the alien and borrowed, migration and extractivism, everyday life and the affective materiality of things. By moving certain objects from places that are geographically far apart, kept separate due to capitalist, colonial and border policies, she challenges the institutional structures of museums and embassies, where logistics, bureaucratic processes and surveillances can become part of the work and of future archives. The forces of spirituality and the desire to communicate the ineffable underpin her work in an ongoing attempt to transcend time and space, paying attention to the histories that materials and objects invoke.
In this podcast we talk (in total darkness) to Lydia about her relationship with echo as a phenomenon for the creation of negative space, about listening as a trigger for singular experience and the necessary interval between one word and another, between the emission of a word and its resonance. We follow the import journeys of empty oil barrels from Algeria to England and explore the care of friends and family that was activated during the pandemic in moving from her flat in Algiers for an exhibition. We also talk about her connection to spirituality through her family experience, a community persecuted for its faith in her home country. Finally, we hear some open questions about the idea of home, belonging and freedom, and about the miraculous, the unexplained and the absolute.
Conversation: Violeta Ospina, Noela Covelo and Anna Ramos. Script and sound production: Violeta Ospina. Voice over: Javiera Cadiz. Sounds: bat recordings in Barcelona.
Yasmine Boudiaf
Researcher and creative technologist Yasmine Boudiaf describes her art practice as “tin foil hat research”. She creates playful projects rooted in deep research methodologies ranging from writing to computing, in order to shed some light on the shape-shifting White Devil tactics behind ruling powers and new technologies. In this podcast, Yasmine Boudiaf walks us through some of her experiences in the corporate world and the performative aspects of negotiating the deeply entrenched British class system. She talks about AI ethics and the theater behind policy-making as well as soft power and Newspeak.
Bouchra Khalili
Through a practice that combines documentary, conceptual art, installation, and oral storytelling, Bouchra Khalili explores questions of self-representation, political agency, and the resistance strategies of individuals and communities rendered invisible by the colonial, oppressive, and exclusionary dynamics of nation-states. Who is a witness? Who tells the story? Who documents, archives, and transmits the accounts that reach us? These are the central questions that run through all of Khalili’s work. In this podcast, we talk to Bouchra Khalili about what it means to produce images and to approach film and documentary practice from new places and perspectives.
Sethembile Msezane
Working from the foundations of historical narrative and its constructs, African knowledge systems, and a contemporary take on colonial wounds, South African artist Sethembile Msezane has an interdisciplinary practice that goes beyond critique. In this podcast, Sethembile talks about her rejection of modern throwaway culture, convinced that the history and experiences of ancestors contain clues and know-how that allow us to imagine different futures. She believes that good omens must enter through spirituality and dialogue with ancestors. Art is simply a tool.