Son[i]a #308. Susan Bee Deleted scenes

New York artist Susan Bee defends the political and subversive potential that develops when art and pleasure unite. Which is why imagination, poetry, humour, subjectivity, textures, colours, lines, and matter play an essential role in her work, both in her collages and paintings and her artist’s books. As an art student in the late sixties, she first came in contact with feminist activism and other social movements such as black power, gay rights, and protests against the Vietnam War. In 1986, she embarked on the project M/E/A/N/I/N/G, a self-managed art magazine that she co-edited with fellow artist Mira Schor for thirty years. In this podcast, Susan also shares the particularities of being a woman and an artist who has passed the age threshold of 65 in New York’s artistic ecosystem today.

Marysia Lewandowska talks about the Women’s Audio Archive, about the crucial need to generate counter-narratives in totalitarian regimes, about networking before networks, about the boundaries between the private and the public, the negotiations generated by the shift from one sphere to another, the responsibilities of the archive, and the potential to generate conversation through art.

Interview with Stuart Bailey, co-editor of the magazine “Dot Dot Dot” and one of the two people behind the print shop and bookshop Dexter Sinister.

Teal Triggs talks about the historical background of zines and their key role in generating communities outside of the mainstream. She discusses in particular the Riot Grrrl movement and the language and visual universe that opened up as a result of the cross between music, DIY, activisim, femininity, and feminism in the self-publishing world.