Son[i]a #297
Aura Cumes
Aura Cumes is a Maya Kaqchikel researcher, teacher, writer, and activist from Guatemala. Her defense of the social and political rights of indigenous peoples is based on dismantling the three major systems of domination, plunder, and expropriation that have been used to subjugate Latin American societies since the 16th century: colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy.
Aura Cumes defends a Maya identity that goes beyond the bounds of the strictly cultural in order to create a political, collective “we” that can consider what the Maya want to be now, while also recovering the capacity to write their own history. In this podcast, Aura Cumes charts a lucid historical path through colonial processes, analysing the mechanisms of control, violence, and dispossession that have perversely shaped the identity of the native-servant, relegated in favour of the progress and well-being of white men, their families, and their capital. Racism and sexism thus progress side by side, in a web of exploitation in which hierarchies often overlap.
Aura Cumes also talks about the ontological multiplicity that stems from the “Popol Vuh”, the sacred book of the Maya; she discusses the particularities of the struggles of indigenous women, who cannot simply add their own demands to those of white feminism which reproduces the scourges of colonial racism; and she recounts some of the resistance strategies being used by the Maya peoples –particularly Maya women– to defend their lands, their natural resources, and their ways of life.
Liisa-Rávná Finbog
In this podcast, we talk with indigenous Sámi researcher, writer, curator and artist Liisa-Rávná Finbog about napkins, museums, collections, and colonialism, to challenge hierarchies, cultural extractivism, and the hidden violence in any process of cultural assimilation. We also highlight the causal relationship between art and coloniality, questioning the separation between function and aesthetics. Duodji thus emerges as an ancestral practice and knowledge system — that dismantles and emancipates itself from the Western construct of craft, while invoking a dialogical relationship with materiality. We open a portal to understand and share the ways of thinking, being, and existing in interdependence, of the Sámi people.
Ramón Grosfoguel
In this podcast, Puerto Rican sociologist and activist Ramón Grosfoguel guides us through centuries of obscurantism in Europe: from Christopher Columbus’s meeting with Queen Isabella in Granada on 11 January 1492 to the debate between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepulveda that laid the groundwork for the biological and culturalist racism that persists to this day. In doing so, he dismantles the Doctrine of Discovery and the universalist and ahistorical assumptions of Eurocentrism and modernity that still abound in academia.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Tucuman artist Gabriel Chaile, which we couldn’t include the first time around. We talk about his education through a mix of public school, recounted memories, and observing family handicrafts. Once again, we defend slowness as a way of being and living in the world, and we join Nestor García Canclini in wondering how to think about the coexistence of elements or groups that consider themselves different, in our turbulent times.
AM Kanngieser
Political geographer and sound artist AM Kanngieser works in the coordinates between space and sound. This merging of disciplines that seems completely normal to her tends to be more perplexing to the compartmentalised world of science and academia than to the undisciplined field of artistic practice. In this podcast, we become the listeners as AM Kanngieser reflects on expanded listening, on the inaudible, and on our anthropocentrism. They talk about their long-standing interest in sound governance and dissect the many tensions that built up in the project “Climates of Listening”, which was originally based on the intention of amplifying campaigns for self-determination and self-representation in the Pacific.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the conversation with artist, weaver, writer, poet and indigenous researcher Elvira Espejo Ayca that we were unable to include the first time around. We talked about the flow of linguistic structures and writing processes, introducing the notion of “oraliture” and the importance of the rhythm of song in the exchanges that take place in her community.
Elvira Espejo Ayca
Elvira Espejo Ayca is an indigenous artist, weaver, writer, poet and researcher. Her work brings to light collective strategies that resist monoculturalization, moving back and forth between the rural and urban, between ancestral practices and the colonial gaze, between the sentipensamiento (feeling-thinking) of indigenous peoples and the predominance of academic Eurocentrism. In this podcast, we take a deep dive into the actions of the National Museum of Etnography and Folklore (MUSEF) of La Paz (Bolivia) in search of mutual understanding and respect, while weaving and reweaving the historical gaps and bridges between two worlds.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Aura Cumes that we were unable to include the first time around.
Daniel Inclán
Mexican historian and 'violentologist' Daniel Inclán talks about coffee, Zapatismo, à la carte politics, hamburgers, long presents, tacos, biographical narcissism, authoritarianism in democracy, aesthetic whiteness, and the nixtamalisation of maize.
Raquel Gutiérrez
Raquel Gutiérrez talks about semantic revision and political experimentation, about the failure of “just add women and stir” policies, about popular feminisms and the women's struggle, about what happens when Sumak Qamaña (living well) stops being a path and becomes a model, and about how to introduce the agenda of the autonomy of the body into her notion of 'politics in feminine'.
Silvia Federici
Interview with Silvia Federici about new models of communalism and of revalorisation of reproductive work that allow us to confront/address the debacle of the capitalist system.