Son[i]a #307
Fefa Vila

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

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

Cabello/Carceller is the artist duo Helena Cabello and Ana Carceller. Since the early nineties, they have been questioning the arbitrariness and restrictions imposed by gender divisions on our bodies, spaces, representations and behaviour. In this podcast Cabello/Carceller infiltrate the arts institution and show how queer voices are systematically excluded from spaces of power, as well as museums and collections. Through their work, they invite us to reconsider the spaces we live in and leave, in order to queer them and turn them into transitional, unproductive places – sometimes melancholy, sometimes liberating – from which to imagine and activate new kinds of existence. Together, we activate the political potentiality of bodies, affects, festivity and collectivity. But we also acknowledge the solitary revolt of discordant bodies who, by their mere presence, are already doing politics

Lucía Egaña is an artist, writer, teacher, and anti-racist transfeminist activist. Lucía is a misfit researcher who for years has been implementing protocols designed to self-institute practices and spaces underpinned by a collective approach. Her methodology is undisciplined (or, as she says, subnormal), championing the bizarre, dirty, and marginal as a fertile testing ground for various relational, educational, and/or artistic devices. In this podcast we talk to Lucía Egaña about pedagogical processes, bibliographic dissent, wild writing, and the generative and affirmative potential of rage. We discuss identity politics, single-sex spaces, friendship as an engine for research, and the power of processes organised around informality and affects.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with researcher, artist and cultural worker Daniel Gasol. We talk about the instrumentalisation of difference, the melancholy of normality, research practice, legitimised and non-legitimised knowledge… and a bunch of mid-to-long term plans.

Cultural worker, researched and artist Daniel Gasol describes himself as a “faggot child of the proletariat and cultural worker,” not (just) to provoke a response, but as a carefully calibrated strategy, fully aware that it immediately highlights the class privilege that informs any contemporary artistic practice and possibility of being. In this podcast, makes an against-the-grain reading of Spain’s Vagrancy Law (1933-1970) and Law of Social Danger (1970-1995) through the prism of class, in which he reviews literature and criminal records  from the National Archive of Catalonia in order to show the criminalisation of the underprivileged classes and of the proletarian body.

In FONS AUDIO #53 El Palomar tell us about their work in the MACBA collection Not Only Homophiles Are Homosexual, but Also Those Blinded by the Lost Phallus, a project in which they take up an unfinished, unproduced script by essayist and anthropologist Alberto Cardín and decide to make the film by their own means. In the course of rereading (and rewriting) Cardín’s cinematic vision, and through a process of immersion and meticulous research into its immediate context and background, El Palomar reconstruct a chapter in our history of sexual dissent, which is today still full of gaps and absences. Chief among them, Alberto Cardín.

In FONS AUDIO #52 Cabello/Carceller talk about their two works in the MACBA Collection: 'I Don't Care about Your Gaze Anymore' (February 1994) and 'A/O (The Céspedes Case)' (July 2009-July 2010). Through them, they reflect on blurred identities, on the diverse possibilities of genders and on the need to create new representations that disrupt the traditional patterns structuring our gaze.

In this podcast we talk to the queer collective El Palomar about art, dissidence, and pedagogy. We dive deep into their strategies for self-care and resilience. We talk about the importance of producing disobedient, abject, situated genealogies, despite the obstacles to remembering the past in Spain. We share the experience and trauma of embodied research, and reread the pandemic experience through the lens of the lessons of the silenced AIDS crisis. Touch and queer parties emerge as political possibility and bastions of resistance where drives are liberated, limits are transgressed, and the hostilities of a hetero-centric world disappear, albeit temporarily.

Élisabeth Lebovici reflects on the AIDS crisis during the eighties, and on the crucial role of conceptual art and activism in shaping the new visual and affective paradigms which gave voice to communities that the capitalist, liquefied society was (and still is) striving to smother. We also talk about poetry, pornography, and all that art that museums balk at hanging on their walls.

This project by the researcher and curator Marta Echaves is structured as a web of complementary, interconnected narratives that reconstruct the silenced history of a generation marked by heroin and AIDS in post-dictatorship Spain.

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

AMOQA (Athens Museum of Queer Arts) is a hybrid, self-organized platform for the research and promotion of arts and studies on sexuality and gender, operating in Greece since 2016.

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

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

Griselda Pollock talks about her involvement in the Women’s Movement in England in the seventies, and about the points of convergence between feminism and art history. Pollock advocates the need to decentralise and diversify knowledge, and to design resistance strategies specific to each socio-political context. And, last but not least, also reflects on memory technologies, trauma, Oedipal and mother-child relationships, narratives of progress, and Bracha Ettinger’s matrixial ethics.

We shared some mates with val flores as we chatted about queer pedagogy, writing, and microactivism. We touched on teaching practice as political practice, on queer dissidence as a means to activate deheterosexualisng know-how, and on the need to inhabit and write our identities in new ways that break down gender, race, and class boundaries.

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

María Salgado talks about low-tech poetry, syncretism, spoken text, writing and orality, busy channels, the powers of the prefix 'an', drugs, and the productive tension between expressions used on the streets and those stored in books.

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

Alberto Berzosa talks about the role of cinema before the transition in Spain in reference to two case studies: gay cinema and militant cinema.

Paul Beatriz Preciado, co-curator of the show along with Teresa Grandas, talks about the exhibition "The Passion According to Carol Rama". Preciado takes us on a discursive tour through Rama's career, describing the processes of invisibilisation of her work that succeeded each other to the point where she became "completely extemporaneous".