OBJECTHOOD #5
Curated by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros.
This is a podcast about objects, but especially about some theories that have recently brought new perspectives on objects from contemporary art and theory. In this episode, we talk to Hito Steyerl, Helen Hester and Roula Partheniou about a number of ramifications of the idea of object in their respective practices. The 1997 track by Operator & Baffled that opens the programme, ‘Things Are Never’, repeats over and over again that things are never quite the way they seem.
OBJECTHOOD #5 underlines the view of objects as points of convergence of a multitude of social, political, economic relations, trapped in matter and more or less made invisible by their everydayness.
Lithium mines, Trotskyist sects, black boxes, planetary exodus, augmented architecture, a city as big as the entire planet Earth, the mythology of Area 51. McKenzie Wark, Liam Young and Mette Edvardsen explore these and other ideas in an attempt to think about space as more than just a medium. Space as object.
The slippery materiality of untraceable objects: from the arsenic poisoning the wells of Bangladesh as told by Nabil Ahmed, to Arie Altena's account of the superstition surrounding the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia, or the bizarre biology of the vampire squid from hell in a passage of Vilém Flusser’s ‘Vampyroteuthis Infernalis’ read by AGF.