Son[i]a #200
Paul B. Preciado on Carol Rama
Carol Rama’s work did not have the opportunity to be seen in its own time. There was no epistemic-political framework in which it could be shown. Censorship pushed her into the margins of amateurism and the obscene. So the things that should have been said about Rama were left unsaid. But are we ready for Carol Rama now, in the 21st century museum?
Born into a bourgeois industrial family in Turin, Rama’s work spans seven decades (1936-2006), creating a counter-archive that reconstructs the history of the 20th century avant-gardes. Carol Rama experimented with informalism, concrete abstract art and arte povera, without ever becoming part of these eminently male movements.
With her portraits of confinement, her organic bricolage, and her animalistic self-representations, Rama has created an oeuvre that transcends the biographical material –which it simultaneously feeds off– to invent a new dissident, utopian body.
SON[I]A talks to Paul B. Preciado, co-curator of the show along with Teresa Grandas, about the exhibition “The Passion According to Carol Rama”. Preciado takes us on a discursive tour through Rama’s career, describing the processes of invisibilisation of her work that succeeded each other to the point where she became “completely extemporaneous”.
Fefa Vila
Fefa Vila Nuñez is a queer feminist ‘artivist’, sociologist, mother, essayist, teacher, and many other things. Fefa was one of the founders of the lesbian collective LSD (1993-1998), which was, together with La Radical Gai, one of the touchstones of queer artivism in Spain in the 1990s. Through their political-artistic actions, LSD and La Radi defended new ways of understanding the body, sex, life, death, desire, friendship, family and work relationships, and political action. In this podcast, Fefa Vila reflects aloud on queerness as a state of radical estrangement, which is constantly being redefined. She also talks about the need to experience other forms of sociability, about other affective-relational models and about motherhood.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Beatriz Preciado about Carol Rama that we were unable to include the first time around.
Judith Butler
Interview with Judith Butler about politics, economy, control societies, gender and identity.
Beatriz Preciado
Interview with Beatriz Preciado, a lecturer in the PEI program who also leads the workshop "Art After Feminisms".
Beatriz Preciado
Beatriz Preciado speaks about gender theories.