Son[i]a #353

In this podcast, we begin with visual artist Teresa Solar Abboud sharing her Notebooks, because they condense the heartbeat of her daily practice. They are repositories of memory that also project themselves into the future and acquire the polymorphic layers of her creative processes. We spend some time talking about her work processes and the material conditions that underpin her practice. We also reflect on questions of scale, on the use of colour, on textures, and on subsurface ecosystems that hybridise the natural and industrial, the past and present.

Mari Chordà was born on 14 May 1942 in Amposta, Tarragona, a land to which she is deeply attached. She is a painter, sculptor, writer, poet, and activist, whose painting and poetry speak of pleasure, motherhood, and the female body. She was also among the first of her generation to propose the idea of free sexuality. Mari Chordà developed her own pictorial style in formal and colour terms, without following trends but focusing on the direct depiction of her own body—the female body—and its cavities, sinuosity, fluids, and mutations. 

We dig up some unreleased fragments from our conversation with the artist, art historian, researcher, and educator Teresa Lanceta. We delve into her research on Las cigarreras, which documents and focuses on the forms of organization, solidarity, and care among the women workers in the tobacco industry in Spain in the early 20th century. We also share her relationship with the collector Bert Flint, the (for her) impossible bridge to pre-Columbian textiles, and her way of understanding and carrying out co-authorships.

Through a practice that combines documentary, conceptual art, installation, and oral storytelling,  Bouchra Khalili explores questions of self-representation, political agency, and the resistance strategies of individuals and communities rendered invisible by the colonial, oppressive, and exclusionary dynamics of nation-states.  Who is a witness? Who tells the story? Who documents, archives, and transmits the accounts that reach us? These are the central questions that run through all of Khalili’s work. In this podcast, we talk to Bouchra Khalili about what it means to produce images and to approach film and documentary practice from new places and perspectives. 

We dig up some unreleased fragments of the conversation with artist, weaver, writer, poet and indigenous researcher Elvira Espejo Ayca that we were unable to include the first time around. We talked about the flow of linguistic structures and writing processes, introducing the notion of “oraliture” and the importance of the rhythm of song in the exchanges that take place in her community.

Elvira Espejo Ayca is an indigenous artist, weaver, writer, poet and researcher. Her work brings to light collective strategies that resist monoculturalization, moving back and forth between the rural and urban, between ancestral practices and the colonial gaze, between the sentipensamiento (feeling-thinking) of indigenous peoples and the predominance of academic Eurocentrism. In this podcast, we take a deep dive into the  actions of the National Museum of Etnography and Folklore (MUSEF) of La Paz (Bolivia) in search of mutual understanding and respect, while weaving and reweaving the historical gaps and bridges between two worlds.

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.