Son[i]a #296
Nora Sternfeld
This podcast is part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. In collaboration with Sonic Acts. Interview by Anna Ramos. Produced by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros.
From an extremely critical point of view at the intersection of art and politics, curator and educator Nora Sternfeld constantly breaks the fourth wall of research and curating, shining a light on terms such as “exhibition”, “gallery”, “representation”, “museum”, and “collectivity”, always looking for cracks and hidden connections.
In this podcast, Nora Sternfeld starts by putting forward a few ideas that can help us understand the crisis of the museum as institution, “as it happened”, from construction to eventual collapse. She talks about the crisis of the museum model, but also its origins and its relationship to the neoliberal machine that it forms part of, as welll as some attempts to overturn its endemic problems. From there, we talk to Nora about education, power, historical narratives, para-institutions, “unlearning” strategies, and collective knowledge projected into the future: “How can we learn something that doesn’t exist yet? It is not possible that one person will know something that does not exist yet, it’s a contradiction in itself. But, together, each of us, has a bit of a knowledge of something that doesn’t exist yet. So if we bring these imaginations together we can build on a possible imagination that can grow stronger and stronger. In this sense I think that learning cannot be imagined without collectivity. We learn together.”
Anton Kats
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
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.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Irit Rogoff that we were unable to include the first time around.
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 Andrea Fraser that we were unable to include the first time around.
Andrea Fraser
Andrea Fraser talks about the challenges and limitations of cultural activism, about the sub-fields of art, the relationship between artists and the market, and the museum in the neoliberal era.
Walter Mignolo
The Argentine semiotician Walter Mignolo talks about the relation between the construction of history and the perspective of power, as imposed by the West.