Son[i]a #287
Sofia Olascoaga
This podcast is part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. Library music produced by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros and Stephen Sharp at Ina GRM (Paris). Interview by Anna Ramos. Script by Loli Acebal. Produced by Violeta Ospina.
Cuernavaca is a small city with a temperate climate and exceptional natural beauty, around 80km south of Mexico City. From the 1950s to the 1980s, it attracted several generations of intellectuals and activists, becoming a testing ground for social initiatives that explored new ways of living and learning.
In 1967, with the support of the bishop Sergio Méndez Arceo, Ivan Illich and Valentina Borremans founded the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC), an archive and hub for documenting and promoting social change in Latin America. A little earlier, the Benedictine monk Gregorio Lemercier, encouraged by Erich Fromm, had started a process of group psychoanalysis at the Santa María de la Resurrección Monastery, which led to the founding of the Emaús Psychoanalytic Centre in 1956. And in 1969, the journalist Betsie Hollants left CIDOC and set up the CIDHAL to study the situation of women in Latin America.
Sofía Olascoaga (b. 1980, Mexico City) is an artist, curator and researcher. Growing up in a community founded by her parents and other families in Cuernavaca has marked her work, leading her to move in the intersections of contemporary art, education, research, and the creation of spaces for collective action. Among other projects, in 2011, Sofía Olascoaga embarked on “Between Utopia and Failure. An affective genealogy”, a collective research process that looks back at this recent history of Cuernavaca, allowing her to explore how these practices of communal living resonate in the present and also to understand the experience of her own childhood.
In this podcast, Sofía Olascoaga gives an overview of the activist history of Cuernavaca and reflects on how community and self-managed spaces can drive social change, while also looking at the processes of cultural and institutional colonisation by the West in Latin America. Olascoaga also brings to light the historical silencing of the voices of women and indigenous communities under these kinds of processes.
Deleted scenes
We dig up an unreleased fragment of our conversation with artist, educator and researcher Mônica Hoff, questioning the notion of creativity, that we were unable to include the first time around.
Andrea Francke
Hablamos con la artista Andrea Francke sobre su interés en las infraestructuras y proyectos participativos. Inclusión, hospitalidad y los ecos del proyecto colonial aparecen en la conversación. Andrea va deshaciendo la idea de fracaso mientras reflexiona acerca de los desafíos que conlleva la elaboración de políticas y marcos legales institucionales. Hablamos también de categorías de arte importadas, de trabajos invisibles y de la idea de caridad como un callejón sin salida.
Eva Rowson
Curator, artist and cultural producer Eva Rowson talks about her early contact with hospitality, collective learning experiences such as Open School East, the value of uncharismatic work, throwing parties with Andrea Francke, life lessons of a croissant, and how the best theory comes from practice.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Olivia Plender that we were unable to include the first time around.
Olivia Plender
Artist and researcher Olivia Plender talks about productivity and care, about suffragettes and museums, and about adolescence and schools. She looks at groups without charismatic leaders, embodied education, and the possibility of transforming errors in honest discussions.
Janna Graham
Janna Graham talks about critical and radical pedagogy, about the educational turn, and about how pedagogical practices interact with cultural practices and social struggles. She discusses her experiences at different institutions, reflecting on the risk of the museification of activism in the midst of the neoliberal mélange, and talks about "parasitic" processes in the redistribution of cultural resources into social justice projects, and about the challenge of actively integrating the voices and demands of the marginalised groups that the museum works with.
Irit Rogoff
Irit Rogoff talks about ways of creating participatory, creative, and cognitive alliances that allow us to critically inhabit contemporaneity. She also calls for the need to devise processes of unlearning, inside and outside the academy, that will pave the way to new and unexpected kinds of knowledge.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Sofía Olascoaga that we were unable to include the first time around.