Son[i]a #352
Flavia Dzodan
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Although much of her work comes out of academia—specifically the Sandberg Instituut in Amstardam—Flavia Dzodan takes pains to point out the non-academic nature of her practice. Flavia describes herself as a “scavenger” of theory, an outsider who collects and assembles bits and pieces of existing ideas and hypotheses to construct her own discourse. In her case, this discourse is a sharp and critical analysis of algorithms and digital culture at the intersection of race and gender politics. She places particular emphasis on the way in which the colonial agenda of the past mutates and persists in our digital tools, cultural products, surveillance systems, networks, and data flows.
We talk to Flavia Dzodan about fashion, opulence, peripheries, phrenology, taxonomies, canons of beauty, luxury fakes, and migrant detention centres. An intense journey that touches on her personal history and includes references to other writers, notes on her methodology, and a few potshots at centres of power.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Mexican artist Juan Arturo García. With the design of neutral Spanish as a case study, we broaden our conversation around living and dead languages, dialects, the uses of language and the dynamics of linguistic prestige. We imagine subtitling as a creative space, while rethinking typography from a political lens, questioning legibility and conventional strategies through his own practice.
Françoise Vergès
In this podcast, Françoise Vergès unpacks the social and environmental politics of cleaning and waste, charting and questioning temporal and spatial interactions that create a neutral site of deprivation, exhaustion and exploitation. She sheds light on the economy and politics of exhaustion, pointing out the role of racial capitalism in the climate crisis. Vergès suggests a political re-reading and understanding of vital needs and natural elements through notions of cleaning, hygiene and medicine, and raises revolutionary questions about the prefabricated assumptions of justice and social transformation through re-thinking the museum.
Juan Arturo García
In this podcast, we talk to the Mexican artist Juan Arturo García about language and plants—or about how taxonomy overwrote one tradition of thought and replaced it with another, by way of Latin. Which is, paradoxically, a dead imperial language. We take a close look at his practice, concentrating on the role of speculation, fiction, and the archive in the way his stories come together. We talk about the emergence of neutral Spanish, and Juan Arturo tells us about the first stages of a film that explores the strange arrival of a nuclear reactor in Colombia around 1950.
Martin Zeilinger
Researcher Martin Zeilinger’s work stems from a deep fascination with the grey area where blockchain-related technologies protocols and art intersect. Far from the naive triumphalism of Web3 evangelists, his approach focuses on the artists and projects that actually try to integrate some of the salient features and affordances of distributed, trustless ledgers into their practice. In this podcast, we talk to Martin Zeilinger about the poetic and political potential of the blockchain, while at the same time tracing a somewhat fuzzy timeline that connects 1960s conceptual art to smart contracts, decentralised autonomous organisations and a host of consensus mechanisms.
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.
Roberto Jacoby
Roberto Jacoby opens up his poetry books and talks about writing, inspiration, plundering and dematerialisation; about blacks and whites, sofa-beds, politics and activism.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Argentinian writer and researcher Flavia Dzodan.
Quinsy Gario
Quinsy Gario talks about the role of the activism in the Netherlands today, and about the relation between its performative nature and the boundaries of the museum.