Son[i]a #345
Clàudia Pagès
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The work of artist Clàudia Pagés (b. Barcelona, 1990) unfolds and contracts in many forms. Words, the body, and movement circulate in multiple directions through her processes, forging a tangled linguistic web of micro-narratives that involve critically listening to the immediate environment, and recording it through persistent writing. Depending on the circumstances and moment of her life, her work can materialise as text, performance, and/or objects, in a vital impulse to contain and capture the scattered map of habits, paths, relationships, and conversations that make up our daily lives. Her keen and penetrating eye particularly zeroes in on the distribution, circulation, and consumption systems in capitalist economies, with all their sharp edges and flaws.
In this podcast, we open Clàudia Pagés’s box of tricks and tools. Repetition, ‘zoom-ins’, physical and metaphorical shifts, and translation emerge as some of her main strategies, while singing, composing, and dancing come together as desire and a pure space of experimentation and possibility. Writing, materiality, orality, rhythm, movement… it all involves the body, and it must all fit into a suitcase too.
Musical references
02:35 “Vas marxar”
11:58 “Gerundi circular” (fragment)
14:43 “Gerundi circular” (fragment)
17:25 “Arrela’t, nena, arrela’t” live (fragment)
25:57 “Arrela’t, nena, arrela’t” live (repeated fragment)
32:35 “Ja és setembre (Spanish)” from “Rates i cuques” (fragment)
40:31 “Calor d’estiu (Spanish)” from “Rates i cuques” (fragment)
48:50 “Baixants” (fragment)
51:45 “Baixants” (fragment)
57:07 “Baixants” (fragment)
2022. All rights reserved. © by the respective authors and publishers.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with artist and writer Clàudia Pagès that we were unable to include the first time around. We talk about living and writing in different languages, about the fragile balance between precision and artefacts, about Spanglish, and about standing up for Spanishisms. We also look into shared readings as a strategy for thinking together.
Marc Vives
It’s not just that Marc Vives’s work eludes categories and concise descriptions, which it does. Rather, it is like a kind of art of elusion itself, a tenacious and obstinate exercise in dodging limits and clear formalisations. His is a generative systems art, an alchemy of closeness, a kind of cartomancy that zeroes in on social relations and interpersonal connections. And It tends to put pressure on the logic of the white cube and the logic of cultural management, one thing on top of the other, all at once. In this podcast we talk to Marc Vives about swimming, about nerves, about floors stripped of paint, and about strategies for eschewing comfort and courting risk and emptiness in the usually safe environment of the art world.
Jara Rocha
Researcher and activist Jara Rocha’s practice is concerned with mediating and mobilising the conditions of meaning production and materials for possibility. Fond of complexity and grounded in a trans*feminist sensibility, they explore the inequalities and stark contrasts in the distribution of the technological. They draw attention to the politics and aesthetics embedded in infrastructures and to how power organises itself, becoming simultaneously visible and inaccessible. A pure exercise in political imagination and situated dissidence that takes us from reproductive technologies to critical pedagogies in formal, non-formal, and informal structures, by way of technocolonialism and turbocapitalism. Without ever taking our eye off the global perspective and our immediate environment: from global care chains to the precarisation, invisibilisation, and offshoring of labour.
María Salgado
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.