Son[i]a #350
Jara Rocha
![Son[i]a #350](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/givemefive_jara_rocha_nt.jpeg)
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. Through a myriad of alliances and constellations based on the collective, they observe, highlight, and desecrate received methods and rigidities in knowledge production and the reproduction of life. Rigour and self-defence are both present in their theoretical work, which formally mutates from bug reports to open manuals and academic writing. This allows them to seek new ways of broadening the possible in order to detect zones of power, in which dissidence is not reduced to antagonism but also embraces affirmative, strategic gestures.
This podcast kicks off with one of the most intimate chapters of Jara Rocha’s life story: the experience of co-parenting in a non-nuclear-family space. This very recent experience has revealed thousands of facets and complexities with which to continue to draw attention to and dismantle the architecture of a social construct we take for granted: from the ramifications of the desire to gestate, to the pitfalls of the political fiction of the family as institution, and the need to activate a new vocabulary that breaks away from reductionist heteropatriarchal semantics. 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.
Joana Moll
Through a combination of artistic research, detective work, and an almost forensic approach to our own data trail, Joana Moll’s work exposes some of the most pressing issues of our data-driven, data-centric existence. Her research projects, talks, workshops and art pieces slip through the cracks of corporate behemoths to make sense of their polymorphic nature and reveal some of the hidden layers that shape and sustain the hypercapitalist fractal. In this podcast, we talk to Joana Moll about interfaces and their social implications, about technocolonialism, agency, surveillance, exploitation, speculation and, why not, about laughter.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with philosopher, writer, and teacher Marina Garcés. We talk about experience transmission vs models, paradoxes, counterpower and learning from each other.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with researcher and activist Jara Rocha. We talk about research as an interdependent practice and we call for complexity. Along the way, we speculate on non-coercive forms of computation and consider some case studies from the collaborate project Possible Bodies and its spin-off, Underground Division.
Ramon Amaro
The researcher and lecturer Ramon Amaro introduces the basics of machine learning, its criteria for assigning value, the collision between blackness and the artificial, its flaws, and the problem of impunity that all too often accompanies them. He also calls for a techno-resistance that would require us to sacrifice our current view of the world and of ourselves.
Femke Snelting
Possible Bodies questions and problematises the formulation, conception, and rendering of bodies across different 3D technologies such as modelling, tracking and scanning. Their affirmative critical research draws attention to the ways in which these techniques end up implementing and even amplifying a host of prejudices based on race, gender, class, age and ability which, far from being circumstantial, are woven into the actual source code of all sorts of applications. We talk to Femke Snelting about embodiments, optimisation, and 3D disasters, about the possible and the probable, parametric interfaces, and open standards, and about disobedient action research.
Clàudia Pagès
The work of artist Clàudia Pagés 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. 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.