Son[i]a #260
Germán Labrador
Germán Labrador Méndez (b. Vigo, 1980) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures at Princeton University. In books like Letras arrebatadas, poesía y química en la transición española (2009) and Culpables por la literatura. Imaginación política y contracultura en la transición española (2017), he looks at the role of various cultural resistance movements and artists in the history of the Iberian peninsula.
From the 1854 uprisings to the present, Labrador stitches together a myriad of forgotten documents – including graffiti, songs, and poems – and endows them with meaning, expanding the aesthetic and political scope of the counterculture. He reconstructs new constellations of listening and opens up a shared conversation with authors who were able to imagine other, more radical democratic forms that are yet to be constructed.
In this podcast we talk to Germán Labrador about gastro-politics and nouvelle cuisine, about cannibalism and the class war, about Land Art, stone, and subalternity, about tides, poems, ditches, and fetishes, about imbalance as the basis of all order, and about how barricades and literature, which are part of the same process, manage to conceive of each other.
Kristin Ross
Kristin Ross reflects on the power of subjectivity in addressing history, and on oral memory and first-person accounts. She examines the subversive potential of today’s environmental struggles as forms of activism capable of generating a new ecological, social, and political intelligence, and she recaptures the associative and cooperative spirit of the Paris Commune, explores the needs to move beyond official national fictions, and defends solidarity as a political strategy.
This project by the researcher and curator Marta Echaves is structured as a web of complementary, interconnected narratives that reconstruct the silenced history of a generation marked by heroin and AIDS in post-dictatorship Spain.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Germán Labrador that we were unable to include the first time around.