Son[i]a #370
Bouchra Khalili
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“Who really speaks when someone speaks?” asks Bouchra Khalili (Casablanca, 1975). In the 1970s, this question was also asked by filmmaker and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini, embodying the figure of the “civic poet” who owns his own words and addresses the community, aware of the transformative power of the encounter between the individual and the collective. Something similar occurs with the narrators that Khalili brings together in her pieces: they tell their own life stories, but in doing so they connect to those of their communities of origin, stories of migration and constant movement. She weaves them together into stories in which interrogating the past and the present makes it possible to project possible futures. An emancipatory gesture of collective fabulation that also challenges viewers.
Bouchra Khalili was born in Casablanca in 1975 and grew up between Morocco and France. She studied Film and Fine Arts in Paris and currently lives in Berlin. Through a practice that combines documentary, conceptual art, installation, and oral storytelling, 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. Khalili also reflects on ways of working with stories with no archive. How can we narrate what is missing and embody absence? She defends the power storytelling—choral and multilingual—and highlights the narrative possibilities of montage and constellations.
Haig Aivazian
Through media such as lectures, performance, video, drawing, installation, and sculpture, Haig Aivazian’s multifaceted works intricately blend the personal and the geopolitical as well as micro and macro narratives. They uncover or perhaps even fabricate complex threads, timelines and visual networks with multiple layers of meaning and ambiguity. His stories are intended to puzzle, reveal intangible connections, and evoke a sense of ghostly friction among conflicting ideas. In this podcast, we talk to Haig Aivazian about counter-propaganda, sports, blackouts, Palestine, fugitivity and what he calls “the dumping grounds of democracy”.
Lydia Ourahmane
Lydia Ourahmane is an Algerian-born multidisciplinary artist who has spent much of her life in the UK. In her installations and interventions, the notions of object and subject—considered separate in Western thought—converge and dialogue between the public and private, the alien and borrowed, migration and extractivism, everyday life and the affective materiality of things. In this podcast we talk (in total darkness) to Lydia about her relationship with echo as a phenomenon for the creation of negative space, about listening as a trigger for singular experience. We also talk about her connection to spirituality through her family experience, a community persecuted for its faith in her home country. Finally, we hear some open questions about the idea of home, belonging and freedom, and about the miraculous, the unexplained and the absolute.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Bouchra Khalili that we were unable to include the first time around. We talk about her relationship with photography and the haunting presence of history in it.
Anti-racism and anti-colonial resistance from the perspective of people of African descent
We talk with Lucía Piedra Galarraga, Diego Falconí Travez and Karo Moret from the Study Group on Afro/Black Ideas, Practices, and Activisms about altars, ekekos, nefandos, Saint Barbara, and Valdivia's Siamese twins. They turn their attention to the politics of hair, talk about sugar as the star product plying the Caribbean routes, and acknowledge the usefulness of ashes in proving the extermination of the ancient Andean sodomite communities.
Marina Gržinić
Marina Gržinić talks about amnesia, aphasia, and seizure, about biopower and necropolitics, about borders and volumes, corpus and corpses, about deathscapes, intestines, and holograms, and about the disturbing miniaturisation of affect and empathy, as a process that runs parallel to technological acceleration.
Teresa Lanceta
Teresa Lanceta is an artist, art historian, researcher, and teacher. In this conversation, the sense of touch reclaims space from the gaze. At the same time, we recover the wisdom of weaving in terms of community, as an open source code for those who know and perform it. And through this repetitive, necessary gesture, technique becomes form, and form becomes language. Thus the margins disappear and give way to rhombuses, torn bits, darning, mending... depending on what’s going on at that moment in time.
Naeem Mohaiemen
Naeem Mohaiemen talks about pragmatic politics and failed masculinities, about Yasser Arafat, Muammar Gaddafi, and Salvador Allende, about the backstories of "Two Meetings and a Funeral", and about the Non-Aligned Movement and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. We also talk about the generative aspect of melancholy, behind-the-scenes politics, and the importance of keeping up the search for the things that we still do not know.