Son[i]a #386 Lydia Ourahmane

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. 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. 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.

In this podcast, we talk to Cornelia Sollfrank about art, technology and gender, and about performance, bodies and networks. We go back to the very early days with collective projects such as Frauen und Technik and OBN—groundbreaking experiences in which the screen opened up to make way for this other enormous, virtual space to be inhabited. A wealth of practices, projects and experiences—which she now refers to as techno-feminism—in a career that has led her to explore the commons, organizational aesthetics, and the role of the law and of copyright in defining (or not defining) where an original work of art begins and ends in the digital realm.