Son[i]a #263
Emilio Santiago Muiño
Working simultaneously in various fields such as academia, social movements, and public policy, Emilio Santiago Muiño (b. Ferrol, 1984) studies and supports social processes involved in transitioning to ecological sustainability. His research is based on evidence of a growing energy shortage that will force Western societies to learn to reduce energy use in coming decades. This is by no means a gloomy scenario, but a historical window of opportunity to promote the reenchangment of everyday life, weakening the neoliberal consumer drive and making it posible to imagine a new culture base don values such as mutual care, life stability, and physical activity linked to a satisfying effort. In Muiño’s words, the idea is to “become poor, so as not to kill”. To make a transition based on desire rather than fear, in order to prevent the emergence of a “resource fascism” driven by competition, geopolitical advantage, and the plunder of increasingly scarce material reserves.
In this podcast we talk to Emilio Santiago Muiño about salad gardens in museums, social movements and public policies, about oil as a magical substance, about re-greening, 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.
César Rendueles
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.
Deleted scenes
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.
Andrea Soto Calderón
In this podcast, we talk to philosopher Andrea Soto Calderón about images and power, about the material imagination, desire, and oikonomia. Walking barefoot along this path, we come across minor architectures and silent revolutions. We also consider the possibility of a different geometry of politics, one that turns its back on basic categories of thought such as “fixing”, “establishing” and “substantiating” in favour of inexplicable notions that simultaneously are and are not. Taking this idea further, Andrea suggests replacing the idea of “strategy” and thinking instead about “ways of doing”.
Deleted scenes
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.
Jaime Vindel
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
Yayo Herrero
Yayo Herrero talks about different forms of ecofeminsim, about the political management of desires, expectations, and needs, about the importance of reproductive work and the need to find new patterns of social and institutional co-responsibility, and about the management of the commons.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Emilio Santiago Muiño that we were unable to include the first time around.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Yayo Herrero that we were unable to include the first time around.