Son[i]a #241
Yayo Herrero

A grain of rice sits in a field on the banks of the Mekong river. A water buffalo breaks up soil in the Ifugao terraces in the Philippines. A black box containing rice seeds is placed on a shelf inside the Svalbard seed vault at -18°C in Norway. From such a common seed, hidden in plain sight, artist-scholar Elaine Gan weaves a dynamic network of relationships connecting agroecology and more-than-human sociability, subsistence farmers and climate change, contaminated taxonomies and feminist theory.In this podcast, Elaine Gan talks about crop science, feral technologies, the global pandemic, radical difference, the art of noticing, Matsutake mushrooms, and, of course, the blahblahsphere.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with artist, researcher and theorist Elaine Gan that we were unable to include the first time around.

When we chat to César Rendueles, the pages of his new book “Contra la igualdad de oportunidades. Un panflento igualirtarista” (Seix Barral, 2020) still smell of fresh ink. We talk about the myth of universal connectivity and technological dystopia. We touch on necropolitics, necroeconomics, and the importance of social ties in processes of social change. We go into museums, libraries, and schools to address the problems of public projects and the potential of egalitarian socialization and political imagination. We broach life and the market, work and care, health and business, meritocracy and privileges... to shed light on our shared fragility and our collective obligation to think about economics in a different way, accepting that we will never start from scratch.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with sociologist, editor and writer César Rendueles that we were unable to include the first time around.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with essayist and researcher Jaime Vindel. We explore the aesthetic rift generated in modernity, between art and ecology and the city and the countryside, with particular reference to two of its big icons: petrol stations and car culture.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with writer, researcher and curator Maria Ptqk. We open the door to indigenous epistemologies that help us identify Western mechanisms of knowledge production and legitimisation, we problematise the notion of invasive species, and, three decades after the Cyborg Manifesto, we put a question from Maria Ptqk to Donna Haraway in a bottle.   

We talk to the researcher and curator Maria Ptqk about the possible methodological alliances between art and science. We check out her recent years of research, which have crystalised in the exhibition Science Friction. Life among companion species and in other embodiments and projects. We look at the narrative dimension of scientific knowledge, via Donna Haraway, and at the symbiotic relationships between interdependent organisms through the work of Lynn Margulis. We rethink the complex boundaries between the cultural and natural spheres, and we also embrace the monstrous, in order to call for a multispecies paradigm that overturns human supremacy.

We talk to researcher, teacher, and essayist Jaime Vindel about art, entropy and economics. We go into museums and petrol stations to understand their materiality. We talk about the universal exhibitions of the 19th century and how the removal of objects from their places of origin is directly linked to the process of environmental degradation. We look at their steel and glass pavilions, and find the concrete. We also discuss coal and oil, the concept of productivity, and the dark underbelly of certain visual imaginaries

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

Emilio Santiago Muiño talks about salad gardens in museums, social movements and public policies, about oil as a magical substance, ecofascism, acceleration, and degrowth, and about how an imaginary of more modest utopías may, in the long term, become a means of finding our way home.

María Eugenia Rodríguez Palop talks about “new municipalism” , about the need to adapt justice and human rights to citizen empowerment, about the left’s failure and about the need to recognise ourselves as vulnerable, interdependent beings, and to adapt our public policies accordingly, from a feminist activist perspective.

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

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

The writer and economist Miren Etxezarreta dismantles the false myth of the pensions crisis and explores new financing strategies. She also analyses the cooptation dynamics of neoliberalism, the recent rise of the right, and the crisis of the left, and discusses new citizen action strategies.

Natalie Jeremijenko talks about learning by living together, about the vitality and shortcomings of the environmental struggles of the past, and about how to imagine our relationships with natural systems from this point on.

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

Angela Dimitrakaki talks about the new feminist critique, the limits of democracy, the wiles of post-capitalism, and the ambivalence of the commons. We also touch on the notions of radical curating and collaborative practices.