Son[i]a #294
Olivia Plender
Using formal solutions such as installations, films, comics, sound pieces, and performance workshops, Olivia Plender’s body of work explores group dynamics, looking into the composition of small communities that have operated decentralised from social consensus throughout history.
Plender’s research usually focuses on analysing archival materials and aesthetically translating them, narrating little-known episodes that include the Kibbo Kift theory of social credit during the economic crisis of 1929, spiritualist rites that promote self-improvement, and the forgotten radicality of the suffragettes, whose list of feminist demands is, to a large extent, still to be addressed. The implementation of long-term collaboration process in schools and social centres is another important aspect of her practice, exemplifying a politics based on knowledge settling from the bottom up, through close ties that can survive and grow over time.
In this podcast, 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. And she tells us about women gaining authority through voice training – the material aspect of speech –, and about how, sometimes unconsciously, we adopt a voice for which we feel socially rewarded.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Olivia Plender that we were unable to include the first time around.
Sofia Olascoaga
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.
Jodi Dean
Jodi Dean talks about communism as a still-latent project, about the Party as a scalable global form, about dystopian municipalism, anamorphic ecologies, and liberal democracies, about Not An Alternative and Liberate Tate as examples of sustainable activism practices at museums, about desires, enthusiasm, and trust and about the emotions captured inside social media.