Son[i]a #216
Franco "Bifo" Berardi

We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Céline Gillain that we were unable to include the first time around.

Through a combination of artistic research, detective work, and an almost forensic approach to our own data trail, Joana Moll’s work exposes some of the most pressing issues of our data-driven, data-centric existence. Her research projects, talks, workshops and art pieces slip through the cracks of corporate behemoths to make sense of their polymorphic nature and reveal some of the hidden layers that shape and sustain the hypercapitalist fractal. In this podcast, we talk to Joana Moll about interfaces and their social implications, about technocolonialism, agency, surveillance, exploitation, speculation and, why not, about laughter.

In this podcast we talk to psychoanalyst, writer and academic Suely Rolnik about micropolitics and macropolitics, about the common and the subjective. We talk about air and about the present, and about how difficult it has become to inspire and to conspire. We abandon the idea of the apocalypse but also that of paradise. We turn our attention to spiders, pausing to observe their strong and flexible threads, and we consider creating provisional spiderwebs to allow the emergence of other worlds. For this weaving, Suely borrows and tells us about Guarani terms such as ñe'é, which means word and also soul.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Martha Rosler that we were unable to include the first time around.

Dora García works on projects that tend towards infinite growth, resorting to practices such as invisible theatre, footnotes, and serendipitous exploration. In FONS AUDIO #38, she talks about her projects, her working methods, and the countless historical transfers between psychoanalysis and literature.

Martha Rosler analyses and questions the proliferation of surveillance systems and self-representations in contemporary society, while telling us about artistic circles in the seventies, the seminal video art scene, and the need to keep chasing utopias.

María Ruido talks about the political power of images and the subversive potential of cinematic strategies such as off-screen, voice over, and editing, which help us understand and imagine the world in new ways. She also reflects on the always contradictory relations between the critical and experimental power of culture on one hand, and its institutionalisation on the other

Belgian artist and musician Céline Gillain split her time between working as a high school art teacher and the solitary practice of painting in her Brussels studio, until one day she had enough and organised a residency for six female artists at her grandmother’s house. Five years of collective experimentation with other women paved the way for the creation of hybrid, solo performances combining artistic research, the staging of her speculative writing, and catchy pop songs, carefully woven through complex and seemingly sooth and seamless narratives. We talk with Céline about her incursion into the music industry, stage fright, the power of fragility and depression as a form of resistance today. Paradoxically, her current media of choice are a mix of pop songs, motivational speeches, and updated fictions from the entertainment world, which run through everyday life in a darkly humorous, inimitable way.

RADIOACTIVITY looks into two seminal free radio stations – Radio Alice in Bologna and Radio Tomate in Paris – as singular case studies in which self-management, decentralised organisation and DIY coincide. The mini-series is an introduction to the free radio movement that sprung up in several countries in the seventies as a way of giving voice to actors who were outside the media establishment: an alternative to the dominant narrative that can also be seen as precursor of the horizontal rhizome structure of digital networks.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with the writer, philosopher and political and cultural Franco Berardi.

Interview with the writer, philosopher and political and cultural activist Franco Berardi on citizen resistance in the face of the crisis that currently hangs over Europe and possible strategies for insurrection.