Son[i]a #291
Irit Rogoff

For the Columbian collective Laagencia, mediation and education are indistinguishable from artistic practice. Laagencia first opened its doors in 2010 in the Chapinero district of Bogotá, as an office for art projects with an exhibition space, run by Mariana Murcia, Diego García, Santiago Pinyol, Mónica Zamudio and Sebastián Cruz. Five years later it was rebooted as a collective thinking and study group open to methodological experimentation and informality, always looking for ways to organise new forms of “doing with others”. In this ensemble podcast, we talk with them about these ten years of "extitution"

We talk with philosopher, writer, and teacher Marina Garcés about education and knowledge, about the future, and about time as raw material. We consider the question of how to appear and think with others in this present moment, which demands our active involvement. We discuss the meeting of unequals, and the possibility of strangeness becoming a link. We also explore the logic of the sinking ship or “every man for himself” and the evolution of the words “disobedience” and “freedom”, which leads Marina to emphasise the importance of forming alliances rather than thinking from the reductionist position of unity. At the same time, she invites us to imagine how to weave together worlds that are falling apart.

Nora Sternfeld problematises the educational turn and talks about the crisis of the museum model, radical pedagogy, emancipatory practices and alliances, para-institutions, unlearning strategies and collective knowledge projected into the future.

Process, liminality, mediation, transmission, radio, resonance, orality, archive, and abundance. In our coinciding and crossing of paths with Ukrainian artist, mediator, educator, and musician Anton Kats, “the stars aligned” to put prior learning and formats to the test. Three remote encounters, six hours of recording, and several red-hot scissors have produced this exquisite corpse in which we explore a discourse and practice that tend to spill over and exceed boundaries in both nuance and detail. In this podcast, we talk about the Europe of integration, about memory, dementia, and different ways of not knowing, about artistic research and art that defies representation, about site-specific projects and mobile, ephemeral devices, about narrowcasts and radio as a means of creating common public spaces.

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.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Irit Rogoff that we were unable to include the first time around.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Sofía Olascoaga that we were unable to include the first time around.

Artist, curator and researcher Sofía Olascoaga gives an overview of the activist history of Cuernavaca, a small city, around 80km south of Mexico City, which from the 1950s to the 1980s attracted several generations of intellectuals and activists, 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.