OBJECTHOOD #9
Sign at Entrance to Chernobyl Exclusion Zone - Northern Ukraine. Photo: Adam Jones.
On this episode we continue more or less where we left off in OBJECTHOOD #8, talking about limits and boundaries, but from radically different topics and points of view.
We talk to Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou about her work around nuclear sites, radioactive waste management and temporal and spatial thresholds. Exclusion zones – the concept, the aftermath, the rhetorics around them – become the main focus of our chat. But Kyveli also touches upon a host of related issues surrounding what she calls ‘nuclear unknowns’, as well as alternative approaches to the short but dense history of radiation and nuclear power.
Our second guest, researcher and activist Nishat Awan, talks about unsettlement and geopolitical borders, especially in relation to Pakistan and her field work in Balochistan. We discuss colonial legacy, forced displacement and other ways to conceptualise mapping and spatial analysis tools for working in border areas. Nishat also ties these first person-experiences to her Topological Atlas project, which advocates “moving away from a dominant mode of mapping where experience is elided through a mode of representation that privileges precision over the messy reality of life”.
With the support of:
Coproduced by:
THIS PODCAST IS PART OF NEW PERSPECTIVES FOR ACTION. A PROJECT BY RE-IMAGINE EUROPE, CO-FUNDED BY THE EUROPEAN UNION. COPRODUCED BY SONIC ACTS. CURATED BY ROC JIMÉNEZ DE CISNEROS.
CONVERSATION: ROC JIMÉNEZ DE CISNEROS AND ANNA RAMOS. SCRIPT AND SOUND PRODUCTION: ROC JIMÉNEZ DE CISNEROS. VOICE OVER: BARBARA HELD. COMMISSIONED MUSIC: ALSA OJALA
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International
related episodes
Samia Henni
In this podcast, writer, historian, educator, and curator Samia Henni offers insights into her wide-ranging curatorial and research projects, which delve into key topics such as the role of archives in reconstructing histories, the desert as a colonial construct, and the ongoing impact of colonial toxicity on landscapes and communities. We talk about nuclear tests in Algeria, about contradictions, war propaganda and traumatic exhibitions, and about the absences in colonial archives.
In previous episodes we have hinted at limits as an interesting feature of objects that are often fuzzy or vague, and therefore hard to outline. This time around, we take a radically different approach to limits. A much darker, urgent take on boundaries and edges, if you will. This is not so much about ontological boundaries, but rather about the dangers of looking at the world with no limits in mind. In dialogue with Andrea Ballestero and Chris Korda. Music by Jessica Ekomane.
M Murphy
Murphy works with and against technoscience in the areas of environmental justice and data politics, colonialism, sexuality, reproduction and race. Their approach is interdisciplinary not only in the sense of involving various areas of knowledge, but also in enacting their dual responsibility: the almost impossible task of dismantling extractive racial capitalism, by means of re-imagining radical Black, queer, Indigenous and feminist decolonial horizons and worlds of care. In this podcast, Murphy walks us through permission-to-pollute infrastructures in and around Chemical Valley in the Great Lakes area, the largest basin of fresh surface water on the planet.