Son[i]a #365
Dani Admiss
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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. These biographical circumstances have influenced the forms of her projects, which 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. As such, in her practice she uses community-based research and world-making as curatorial strategies. Her processes always turn to listening, building networks, collaboration, distributed learning, and the desire to slow down. Her project 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 Dani Admiss about art, social practices, and collaborative learning, about cultural institutions, marginal infrastructures, and hacks. We go into climate justice, just transition, and the need to learn more about the profound injustices embedded in social and environmental systems. We also talk about the history of toxicity, about petroculture, and about the desire to build mutual trust and collective agency. Dani Amiss urges us to create and accept pluriversal spaces: in the spirit of the Zapatistas, to forget universality and instead work towards a world where many worlds fit.
This podcast is part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union. Coproduced by Sonic Acts.
Arjuna Neuman
Artist, filmmaker, and writer Arjuna Neuman has been working in tandem with philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva since 2016. The result of their collaboration is an ongoing series of films and installations that merge poetics and critical theory, in a dreamlike polyptych that is disorientating and grounding in equal parts. Their so-called “elemental cinema”—part documentary and part personal essay—considers often overlapping events and disasters of the past, present and future history of the planet: from slavery and police brutality to ecological collapse and the biodiversity crisis.We sat down with Arjuna Neuman to talk about planetary body horror, wind, clouds, blues, tenderness, and the not so evident autobiographical threads in their films.
Eva Rowson
Curator, artist and cultural producer Eva Rowson talks about her early contact with hospitality, collective learning experiences such as Open School East, the value of uncharismatic work, throwing parties with Andrea Francke, life lessons of a croissant, and how the best theory comes from practice.
Andrea Francke
Hablamos con la artista Andrea Francke sobre su interés en las infraestructuras y proyectos participativos. Inclusión, hospitalidad y los ecos del proyecto colonial aparecen en la conversación. Andrea va deshaciendo la idea de fracaso mientras reflexiona acerca de los desafíos que conlleva la elaboración de políticas y marcos legales institucionales. Hablamos también de categorías de arte importadas, de trabajos invisibles y de la idea de caridad como un callejón sin salida.
Janna Graham
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.