Son[i]a #362. Nicole L'Huillier Deleted scenes

Chilean artist Nicole L'Huillier formulates an antidisciplinary practice that takes up a position on boundaries, generating a liminal and sensorial space in which categories such as architecture, science, music and sound tend to break down and intertwine. Thinking with “surlogics”—the logic of her native south— Nicole defends the need to use multiple kinds of thinking at the same time, and embraces mestizaje, as a way of being and existing that is rich and full of complexity and contradictions.  In this podcast, we open up Nicole L'Huillier’s processes, methodologies, and rituals, in conversation with old friends—Gloria Anzaldúa, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Gabriela Mistral, AM Kanngiesser—and strangers. Their membrane-words caress and jolt us. Sounds, vibrations, resonance, structures, and other multiple sensorial transductions invite us to think up, amidst murmuring, other collective ways of being and incarnations.

In the 1990s, twenty minutes was all it took for local authorities in the Austrian city of Graz to detect and neutralise any illegal radio transmitter. Back then, Reni Hofmüller was part of a group of activists who took over the airwaves with pirate broadcasts every Sunday from the mountains surrounding the city. After short 18-minute sessions, the Radio Dauerwelle team would pack up its equipment and clear out, moments before the authorities arrived. In this podcast, Hofmüller shares her early commitment with radio, as well as her obsession with dismantling the invisible in order to understand and question it. A trip through time that takes us from the 1980s to the present, through her personal involvement in feminist discussions from the perspective of new media. Our conversation is riddled with references to her commitment to open source, to doing things together, to the uninhibited mixing of disciplines, and to her passion for the electromagnetic sphere and bicycles.