Son[i]a #309
Terike Haapoja
![Son[i]a #309](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/terike-haapoja_entropy_still-from-video_cterike-haapoja-1280x1067.jpg)
This podcast is part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. Coproduced by Sonic Acts. Music by Dave Phillips
A heat-sensitive infrared camera films a horse just after its death and shows how the colourful thermographic image fades as the body cools. A political party proposes giving voice to “the other”, society’s silent non-human majority. A museum of cattle reconstructs and recounts history from the bovine ruminant viewpoint. Terike Haapoja, Finnish artist and adjunct professor at Parsons Fine Arts and NYU, has spent years deconstructing the anthropocentrism of our worldview, exploring the political and existential boundaries of our broken social model.
Alone or in collaboration with writer Laura Gustafsson, Terike Haapoja appropriates and subverts the structures and idioms of established institutions – museums, political parties, courts – and uses their authority and cultural weight to question entrenched notions of animalisation and otherness, in an attempt to find ethical ways to coexist with nonhuman beings.
Drawing on concepts such as Syl Ko’s black veganism, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s expanded theory of animal rights, and Carol J. Adams’ sexual politics of meat, Terike Haapoja ventures to imagine a world beyond animalisation and distinctions between protected and disposable beings. Her immersive installations and large-scale projects highlight the convergence of racialisation and animalisation in nation states, showing historical and current parallels in the conditioning imposed on subhuman and nonhuman beings.
In this podcast, Terike Haapoja invites us to imagine this posthumanism: a hybrid, expansive, empathetic “we” with room for ambiguity and difference and for interspecies political understanding, in which the morbid fantasy of human exceptionalism and the hierarchy of species is put to rest once and for all.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with finish artist Terike Haapoja that we were unable to include the first time around.
Samaneh Moafi
Samaneh Moafi is an architect and the senior researcher at Forensic Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. She oversees the Centre For Contemporary Nature, a division within Forensic Architecture which explores the relationship between human rights violations, environmental violence, and anthropogenic climate change. In this podcast, Samaneh Moafi turns our gaze to notions of ecocide, negative commons and environmental violence in pursuit of accountability and change. In doing so, she takes us through the Negev desert, extraterritorial toxic clouds, orangutan nests in Indonesia, forest fires and weaponised wind gusts in the Gaza strip.
This new episode of Roc Jiménez de Cisneros' OBJECTHOOD series features conversations with Diego Falconi, Rick Dolphijn, Dave Phillips, and music by Kali Malone. A spiral-shaped trip about fire, burning, ashes, rituals, cooking, food, and jungles. Though it is also about everything that lies in between and beneath each and every one of those things. The invisible micropolitics of food in the military; the symbolic charge of ashes, solid remains of an intangible object – fire – which has shaped this planet for millions of years; the untold gender-related motifs behind the Aimara genocide; a circular, cyclical perception of time; or the role and relevance of ecosystems, even beyond the good old wildlife cliché – because, you know, “everything is an ecosystem, at the end of the day”.
Sounds in Cause
A selection of field recordings from environments that are currently in the midst of a process of irreversible change.
On duration: silence is unavailable, please buy time or switch dimensions
Dave Phillips' mix is a true assault on the senses that reflects on extreme durations in music and our relationship with the temporality of sound.