Son[i]a #357
Andrea Francke

In this podcast, we open up a glossary of concepts that affect and leave their mark on Kathrin Böhm's many constellations and collective projects. From the notion of compost—which triggered a radical shift in her way of working and interacting with her material archive in recent years—to a reassessment of the very idea of economy, which, as Katherine Gibson writes, helps us discern spaces of value production that are not immediately apparent. We talk about how these other strategies and ways of doing things lead us to qualify and problematise alternative ways of understanding social and/or participatory practices, and even to read the idea of community critically.

In this podcast, we talk to Chilean writer, editor and academic Macarena García about her working methods with children in schools and other shared educational spaces. We talk about challenging picture-books, about fascination and overflow as tools for collective transformation, and about what happens to bodies when they are together. We also explore the workings of censorship and how children’s literature approaches subjects such as death, sex, racism, dictatorship, feminism, gender identity and the climate crisis.   

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Chilean writer, editor and academic Macarena García, which we couldn’t include the first time around. Macarena talks about her interest in observing and analysing how processes and consensuses in culture, society, ethics and politics are put to the test in the field of childhood studies. She focuses on artistic expressions such as the case study of children’s literature, and more specifically scrapbooks. We also chart a brief genealogy of picture books and the many narrative strategies that issue from it: from challenging books to non-educational relations between text and image, and the figure of the ellipsis.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with curator, artist and cultural producer Eva Rowson that we were unable to include the first time around. Eva expands on her proposition of being nice as an integral part of her curatorial and managing work, while taking into account the challenges of maintaining safe and welcoming spaces. The questions of quotas and infrastructure pop up in the conversation too.

Dani Admiss is an independent curator, researcher and educator who spent part of her childhood in Dubai before emigrating to the UK and settling in Edinburgh. Her projects are situated at the intersection of art, design, technology and cultural practice and—in a constant search for a sense of belonging—explore infrastructures and relationality. "Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline" emerged in response to the simple and complex question: “How can I be useful?” The answer—by creating a decarbonisation plan for the gallery—gradually took the form of a conversation of many voices, involving various communities in an exercise in social justice and collective learning to rethink the processes of the art world in times of climate emergency.

In this podcast, we talk to philosopher Andrea Soto Calderón about images and power, about the material imagination, desire, and oikonomia. Walking barefoot along this path, we come across minor architectures and silent revolutions. We also consider the possibility of a different geometry of politics, one that turns its back on basic categories of thought such as “fixing”, “establishing” and “substantiating” in favour of inexplicable notions that simultaneously are and are not. Taking this idea further, Andrea suggests replacing the idea of “strategy” and thinking instead about “ways of doing”.

Artist, curator and researcher Sofía Olascoaga gives an overview of the activist history of Cuernavaca, a small city, around 80km south of Mexico City, which from the 1950s to the 1980s attracted several generations of intellectuals and activists, and reflects on how community and self-managed spaces can drive social change, while also looking at the processes of cultural and institutional colonisation by the West in Latin America.

Janna Graham talks about critical and radical pedagogy, about the educational turn, and about how pedagogical practices interact with cultural practices and social struggles. She discusses her experiences at different institutions, reflecting on the risk of the museification of activism in the midst of the neoliberal mélange, and talks about "parasitic" processes in the redistribution of cultural resources into social justice projects, and about the challenge of actively integrating the voices and demands of the marginalised groups that the museum works with.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with artist Andrea Francke. We take Andrea’s life experience as a springboard to talk about diversity and difference, while problematising soft, hard, and universalising theories. We also consider possible spaces for learning based on curiosity, care, and vulnerability. Changing the subject, we naturally took the opportunity to delve into The Piracy Project, in collaboration with Eva Weinmayr—and while we were at it, to defend copying and appropriationism as a political and creative space.