Son[i]a #295
Janna Graham

Dani Admiss is an independent curator, researcher and educator who spent part of her childhood in Dubai before emigrating to the UK and settling in Edinburgh. Her projects are situated at the intersection of art, design, technology and cultural practice and—in a constant search for a sense of belonging—explore infrastructures and relationality. "Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline" emerged in response to the simple and complex question: “How can I be useful?” The answer—by creating a decarbonisation plan for the gallery—gradually took the form of a conversation of many voices, involving various communities in an exercise in social justice and collective learning to rethink the processes of the art world in times of climate emergency.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with artist Andrea Francke. We take Andrea’s life experience as a springboard to talk about diversity and difference, while problematising soft, hard, and universalising theories. We also consider possible spaces for learning based on curiosity, care, and vulnerability. Changing the subject, we naturally took the opportunity to delve into The Piracy Project, in collaboration with Eva Weinmayr—and while we were at it, to defend copying and appropriationism as a political and creative space.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.