Son[i]a #340
Jaime Vindel
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Jaime Vindel is a researcher, teacher, and essayist. For some time now, he has focused on studying the relationship between metaphors of thermodynamics and the cultural imaginaries of fossil modernity, as part of an eco-political revision of art history and visual culture. In his most recent book, Estética fósil. Imaginarios de la energía y crisis ecosocial (Fossil Aesthetics. Imaginaries of Energy and Eco-Social Crisis), Vindel explores the crucial role of fossil fuels in the cultural production of the last two hundred years. He argues that they have led to the naturalisation of a productivist cosmovision that tends to legitimise ecocidal practices and colonial extractivism, radically disrupting (even further) ecological cycles in modes of production.
In this podcast, we talk to Jaime Vindel about art, entropy and economics. We go into museums and petrol stations to understand their materiality. We talk about the universal exhibitions of the 19th century and how the removal of objects from their places of origin is directly linked to the process of environmental degradation. We look at their steel and glass pavilions, and find the concrete. We also discuss coal and oil, the concept of productivity, and the dark underbelly of certain visual imaginaries. By the time we get to today’s eco-social crisis and possible techno-fix and ecofascist solutions, poised on the brink of the precipice, he invites us to abandon apathy, rethink the end of the world, reformat our historical imagination, and transform our ecological outlook.
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We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with writer and researcher Cara New Daggett. We talk about the Mayapple Energy Transition Collective, feminist citation practices, collective writing and the difficulties academia still has with such exercises. We share the traumatic experience of being trolled after writing her essay "Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire". Coping with the pandemic and parenting with the climate crisis on the horizon are also brought to the table.
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We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with writer, researcher and curator Maria Ptqk. We open the door to indigenous epistemologies that help us identify Western mechanisms of knowledge production and legitimisation, we problematise the notion of invasive species, and, three decades after the Cyborg Manifesto, we put a question from Maria Ptqk to Donna Haraway in a bottle.
Maria Ptqk
We talk to the researcher and curator Maria Ptqk about the possible methodological alliances between art and science. We check out her recent years of research, which have crystalised in the exhibition Science Friction. Life among companion species and in other embodiments and projects. We look at the narrative dimension of scientific knowledge, via Donna Haraway, and at the symbiotic relationships between interdependent organisms through the work of Lynn Margulis. We rethink the complex boundaries between the cultural and natural spheres, and we also embrace the monstrous, in order to call for a multispecies paradigm that overturns human supremacy.
Yayo Herrero
Yayo Herrero talks about different forms of ecofeminsim, about the political management of desires, expectations, and needs, about the importance of reproductive work and the need to find new patterns of social and institutional co-responsibility, and about the management of the commons.
Emilio Santiago Muiño
Emilio Santiago Muiño talks about salad gardens in museums, social movements and public policies, about oil as a magical substance, ecofascism, acceleration, and degrowth, and about how an imaginary of more modest utopías may, in the long term, become a means of finding our way home.
Cara New Daggett
Reassessing and defamiliarizing historical narratives that sit at the core of white patriarchal societies, is a necessary feminist practice and one at which Cara New Daggett, writer and researcher in the field of energy politics, excels at. In this podcast, energy, work, utopian demands, and unions, become intertwined with oil cultures, petromasculinities and ecomodernism, to reflect on growth, dependency, debt and energy transitions beyond extractivism. Degrowth, desire, pleasure, feminist science and new story-telling strategies are revealed as key ingredients for the recipe to reimagine ecologically generous ways of life on Earth.
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We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with essayist and researcher Jaime Vindel. We explore the aesthetic rift generated in modernity, between art and ecology and the city and the countryside, with particular reference to two of its big icons: petrol stations and car culture.