Son[i]a #279
Élisabeth Lebovici
Sounds taken from Anna Irina Russell’s blind foley library
When you’re in the business of recording podcasts at a museum, things can’t get much worse than having Élisabeth Leboviciat the microphone when your voice recorder decides to add noise and distortion, and not knowing what’s going on or how to fix it. With her characteristic humour and lucidity, Lebovici incorporated the mishap into her discourse and our conversation flowed smoothly, skirting artifacts and cold sweats. The fragility of the moment, words erased and forgotten, and our determination to keep recording are now part of this document.
Élisabeth Lebovici is an art historian, critic, and activist. She was culture editor of the French newspaper Libération, and is currently the writer of the blog “Le Beau Vice”. In her latest book, “Ce que le sida m’a fait: art et activisme à la fin du XXe siècle”, she draws on personal experience to reconstruct the effects of the AIDS crisis on our ways of living in the world, interacting with each other, and representing ourselves. Over the years, embracing activism and artistic practices, Élisabeth Lebovici has woven a history of feminist, lesbian, queer, and dissident art that diverges from the dominant narratives of patriarchal heteronormativity.
In this podcast, Élisabeth Lebovici invites us to engage with silence. A silence that sometimes inspires and accompanies us, but more often imprisons and isolates us. Silence = Death, said an eighties ACT UP slogan. Lebovici reflects on the AIDS crisis during that decade, and on the crucial role of conceptual art and activism in shaping the new visual and affective paradigms which gave voice to communities that the capitalist, liquefied society was (and still is) striving to smother. We also talk about poetry, pornography, and all that art that museums balk at hanging on their walls.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Isaac Julien that we were unable to include the first time around.
Escenas eliminadas
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Fefa Vila that we were unable to include the first time around.
Isaac Julien
The work of Isaac Julien moves through liminal spaces. Overlapping zones between photography, film, and installation; choreography and dance; poetry and music… and the infinite possible versions, iterations, and variations that can emerge from systematic work with the archive. Intersections in which fiction, documentary, narrative, and radicality converge to produce aesthetically meticulous and politically powerful imaginaries and stories that challenge white heterosexual film conventions through their temporalities, narrative construction, and aesthetic forms. In this podcast, Isaac Julien talks about the need to give a voice and body to dissident black identity and desire in the cinematic imaginary, about expanded cinema and choreographic montage; and about his constant shifts between the worlds of art, video art, and film.
Yaneth Valencia
Yaneth Valencia is a leader, activist mother and poet. She is also community organizer of Lila Mujer, a political space for support, collective creation and affirmation of the lives of black women with HIV, which was founded in 2003 in the working class neighbourhoods of Cali, Colombia. In this podcast, we talk with Yaneth Valencia about the overlapping vulnerabilities that affect black women with HIV in Colombia, linking racism to the lack of a public health system and analysing the relationship between the virus and patriarchal violence, which is exacerbated by war and the forced displacement of black and indigenous peoples from their lands.
Fefa Vila
Fefa Vila Nuñez is a queer feminist ‘artivist’, sociologist, mother, essayist, teacher, and many other things. Fefa was one of the founders of the lesbian collective LSD (1993-1998), which was, together with La Radical Gai, one of the touchstones of queer artivism in Spain in the 1990s. Through their political-artistic actions, LSD and La Radi defended new ways of understanding the body, sex, life, death, desire, friendship, family and work relationships, and political action. In this podcast, Fefa Vila reflects aloud on queerness as a state of radical estrangement, which is constantly being redefined. She also talks about the need to experience other forms of sociability, about other affective-relational models and about motherhood.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Élisabeth Lebovici that we were unable to include the first time around.
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 Maria F. Dolores that we were unable to include the first time around.
Maria F. Dolores/AMOQA
AMOQA (Athens Museum of Queer Arts) is a hybrid, self-organized platform for the research and promotion of arts and studies on sexuality and gender, operating in Greece since 2016.