Son[i]a #342
El Palomar

Violeta Ospina is an artist, an educator, and a facilitator of collaborative projects that pay special attention to sound and the body. Using typical expressions and imaginaries of popular celebrations as raw materials, her work unfolds through multiform devices that seek to intensify the present. Piñatas, scale models, processions, karaoke, carnival, and cabaret all make an appearance in her practice as catalysts for violence and tenderness, which can also awaken the parodic potential that is always latent in everyday situations. Violeta is co-founder of Radio Cava-ret, a project linked to listening and theatricality, which, taking up the baton from the Futurists, calls itself a “radia”: the experimental and erotic flip side of traditional radio.

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

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.

We sat down with curator and researcher Grant Watson to talk about textiles and their material and social ramifications. Instead, we ended up talking about his interview-based practice, essentially producing an extremely meta interview on interviews and interviewing. In this podcast, Grant talks about enacting, editing, demographics, transference, capturing the atmosphere of an interview, and other issues that he explores in one of his main ongoing projects, How We Behave.

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.

Fefa Vila Nuñez is a queer feminist ‘artivist’, sociologist, mother, essayist, teacher, and many other things. Fefa was one of the founders of the lesbian collective LSD (1993-1998), which was, together with La Radical Gai, one of the touchstones of queer artivism in Spain in the 1990s. Through their political-artistic actions, LSD and La Radi defended new ways of understanding the body, sex, life, death, desire, friendship, family and work relationships, and political action. In this podcast, Fefa Vila reflects aloud on queerness as a state of radical estrangement, which is constantly being redefined. She also talks about the need to experience other forms of sociability, about other affective-relational models and about motherhood.