Son[i]a #277
Marina Gržinić
This podcast is part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. Music and sound production commissioned to Antye Greie. Editing by Antonio Gagliano.
Instigator of the first subcultural punk and LGTB movements in the former Yugoslavia, Marina Gržinić (b. Ljubljana, 1958) is the author of more than a dozen critical theory books as well as an artist with an extensive career in collaboration with Aina Šmid. Gržinić explores the different ways in which neoliberalism uses human death to fuel processes of commercialisation and surplus value.
From Abu Ghraib to Lampedusa by way of the history of African culture and the dissolution of the former socialist block, she assembles a political vocabulary that seeks to unravel the effects of global aesthetics on people, drawing attention to the rise and normalisation of what she calls ‘trophy-images’: images rooted in the colonial legacy that display confinement, humiliation, and gratuitous brutality on racialised subjects.
In this podcast Marina Gržinić talks about amnesia, aphasia, and seizure, about biopower and necropolitics, about borders and volumes, corpus and corpses, about deathscapes, intestines, and holograms, and about the disturbing miniaturisation of affect and empathy, as a process that runs parallel to technological acceleration.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with video artist, activist and researcher Marina Gržinić, which we were unable to include the first time around. Marina reflects on her trajectory, together with Aina Šmid, in the field of video art and new media, from the eighties to the present day, from a feminist and socialist perspective.
Bouchra Khalili
Through a practice that combines documentary, conceptual art, installation, and oral storytelling, Bouchra Khalili explores questions of self-representation, political agency, and the resistance strategies of individuals and communities rendered invisible by the colonial, oppressive, and exclusionary dynamics of nation-states. Who is a witness? Who tells the story? Who documents, archives, and transmits the accounts that reach us? These are the central questions that run through all of Khalili’s work. In this podcast, we talk to Bouchra Khalili about what it means to produce images and to approach film and documentary practice from new places and perspectives.
María Ruido
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
Mitra Azar
The Italian artist Mitra Azar talks about points of view and the disembodiment of the gaze, drones, borders, nomadism, never-ending archives, processes, the “artropocene”, and conflict zones as a breeding ground for creative practices.
Mircea Cantor
Mircea Cantor talks about his work 'Chaplet' (2007), about the impact of borders and the society of control, and about the poetic resonance of tracks, materials, and other physical traces.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Daniela Ortiz that we were unable to include the first time around.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Fatima El-Tayeb that we were unable to include the first time around.
Fatima El-Tayeb
Fatima El-Tayeb talks about the need to reassess Europe’s internalist narrative and the discourse of integration. She evaluates the role of race in the construction of this account and argues for the creation and recovery of archives as a strategy for developing other types of narratives.
Quinsy Gario
Quinsy Gario talks about the role of the activism in the Netherlands today, and about the relation between its performative nature and the boundaries of the museum.
Mark Fisher
The cultural impact of Mark Fisher's work continues to grow years after his death in 2017. His tough but always accessible dissection of the system and its endemic problems was captured in essays, posts, and books, such as Capitalist Realism, which gave rise to this conversation. The book explores the dangerous connection between neoliberalism and mental health, almost as a tragic portent of his death, although it is much more than that. In the podcast, Fisher talks about the avalanche of repercussions of the 2008 financial crash, particularly in relation to the idea of capitalism as the only possible framework.