Son[i]a #223
Toni Serra - Abu Ali
The artist, filmmaker, Toni Serra, Abu Ali, co-director of the OVNI festival, perfectly remembers how his anarchist-leaning foundations were undermined when he discovered certain forms of organising life that had to do with the sacred and with religious practices. Although this clash and his subsequent exploration of certain eminently oriental ancestral traditions actually has more to do with a long career closely linked to the exploration of knowledge.
Introspective knowledge of the self, and also knowledge of everything surrounding it. An interest in understanding what happens precisely when you stop understanding: an epistemological path that requires not-knowing and what the Western medical establishment has called “altered” states. Trance, change, flow, and all that inhabits and happens on the planes of the unquantifiable.
SON[I]A talks to Toni Serra about trance, light, shadows, transitions, conditions of life and possibility, about seeing and concealing, about dreaming and unlearning. And about plants, of course.
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 Toni Serra/Abu Ali that we were unable to include the first time around.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Kristine Khouri that we were unable to include the first time around.
Kristine Khouri
Kristine Khouri talks about the traces of modernity in the Arab World, and about the changes that have been produced in, and in relation to, the postcolonial Arab narrative as a result of 9/11 and its global consequences. She also discusses the methodology that she uses to rewrite regional histories based on the analysis of documents and the production of knowledge.
Reflections at a critical juncture: Toni Serra, Ana Longoni and Rubén Martínez
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.