FONS ÀUDIO #34
Daniela Ortiz
The artistic work of Daniela Ortiz (Cuzco, Peru, 1985) and Xose Quiroga (Ourense, Spain, 1979) has a strong component of social struggle. For the past few years, the artists have been carrying out extensive research into migration control strategies and their legal and technical, economic, and media deployment, with special emphasis on the national and political borders of southern Europe. At the same time, they explore how colonial narratives shape the lives of the immigrant population, a social group that is often vulnerable because of their disenfranchised status.
The duo’s projects generate a real-time framework for political discussion that they then speed up so that it multiplies and spreads to contexts beyond the art world. ‘Estat Nació – Part 1. Exercici#1 Història’, which was recently acquired by the MACBA Collection, consists of a set of photographs and inscriptions that correspond to historical figures who are commemorated in Barcelona’s public space in spite of having actively participated in colonial and slavery processes. The series includes figures such as Christopher Columbus, General Joan Prim i Prats, Amat i Junyet, Antoni López i López, Josep Xifré, Valeriano Weyler and Joan Güell, as well as institutions such as the Banco de Barcelona, the Círculo Hispano Ultramarino and the Banco Hispano Colonial, which were involved in anti-abolitionist policies and provided financial support to the colonies.
‘Estat Nació – Part 1. Exercici#1’ Història is part of the larger project ‘Estat Nació’, which explores the relationship between processes of sovereignty construction and the discourses, laws, and rules that affect the immigrant population. It is a work in progress that uses several languages and time-frames: from videos that record actions in public spaces and then go viral to documentation of Catalan language classes in which xenophobic speeches by politicians are used as educational materials, by way of informative counter-manuals on how to pass the tests that measure integration into Spanish society.
Anti-racism and anti-colonial resistance from the perspective of people of African descent
We talk to Karo Moret, Diego Falconí and Lucía Piedra Galarraga interculturality, multiculturality, and migrant sit-ins. They share ideas on cosmopolitics, the Hispanic world, atavisms, and Afrofuturism; on El Cid's beard, the Royal Spanish Academy, and taking academia to the street. They examine the ways in which a transvestite theory of childhood challenges the imaginaries embodied in literature and explore the legal loopholes and the counter-routes of knowledge that could allow us, collectively, to come together in the south.
Patricia Dauder
Patricia Dauder creates essential structures as a result of long-term work processes that allow her to set up a fluctuating dialogue between observation of the physical world, experimentation with matter, and the analysis of systems of representation. In FONS AUDIO #35 Patricia Dauder uses the work Model #1 as a springboard into her creative process and into aspects such as travelling, ruins, colours, textures, and other interests that shape her cosmologies.
Ramon Amaro
The researcher and lecturer Ramon Amaro introduces the basics of machine learning, its criteria for assigning value, the collision between blackness and the artificial, its flaws, and the problem of impunity that all too often accompanies them. He also calls for a techno-resistance that would require us to sacrifice our current view of the world and of ourselves.
Anti-racism and anti-colonial resistance from the perspective of people of African descent
We talk with Lucía Piedra Galarraga, Diego Falconí Travez and Karo Moret from the Study Group on Afro/Black Ideas, Practices, and Activisms about altars, ekekos, nefandos, Saint Barbara, and Valdivia's Siamese twins. They turn their attention to the politics of hair, talk about sugar as the star product plying the Caribbean routes, and acknowledge the usefulness of ashes in proving the extermination of the ancient Andean sodomite communities.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Daniela Ortiz that we were unable to include the first time around.
Reflections at a critical juncture: Daniela Ortiz, Marcelo Expósito and Miguel Noguera
Overwhelmed by the institutionalised discourse of politics and economists, we invite artists, philosophers, researchers and poets to share their ideas about what is happening to us, to comment on the positive and negative implications of this structural crisis, and to imagine an uncertain future.