Son[i]a #376
Yaneth Valencia
![Son[i]a #376](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/yaneth-2.jpeg)
Yaneth Valencia is a leader, activist mother and poet. She is also community organizer of Lila Mujer, a political space for support, collective creation and affirmation of the lives of black women with HIV, which was founded in 2003 in the working class neighbourhoods of Cali, Colombia. Lila is also what the midwifery tradition of the Colombian Pacific call a “dry birth”—the moment when the waters break, before the contractions of the womb—the fruit of the experience of being and knowing oneself to be more than a HIV diagnosis and an embodiment of the social stigma of the “loneliness virus”. From a heartfelt instinct for self-care and the dream of generating a space for collective healing, Lila hosts, accompanies, and employs an extended family of Afro-descendant women, whose ancestors were runaway slaves, many of them affected by the armed conflict and all of them subjected to institutional racism that denies them access to adequate housing, education, and health infrastructures.
In this big family, sustained by hard work for twenty years, the women make noise in the face of the stigma of HIV by cooking up life plans together. Lila Mujer’s kitchen is rebellious, and getting together to drink hot chocolate is for “mutual aid without an s”. Although their tasty dishes are just one of the many skills, complicities and dreams they collectively compose. They also share and revive practices and know-how such as the ancestral tradition of the “seedtime of the navel” in connection with the Pacific runaway slaves, with life and the land, which become a form of resistance to what Yaneth calls the “administration of poverty”: institutional interventions that lack continuity, a social base and commitment.
In this podcast, we talk with Yaneth Valencia about the overlapping vulnerabilities that affect black women with HIV in Colombia, linking racism to the lack of a public health system and analysing the relationship between the virus and patriarchal violence, which is exacerbated by war and the forced displacement of black and indigenous peoples from their lands. We join her in dreaming up a Centre for Popular Research on HIV and a book on the memory of the women of Lila. And above all, we listen to the urgent need and desire conveyed by the social upheaval in Colombia: to live a flavourful life in solidarity with cousins and siblings, still inspired by the Ubuntu philosophy of “I am because we are”.
Carlos Motta
Carlos Motta sees his research as a potential space of enunciation from which to act as a counterweight to the prevailing narratives—a positive gesture of recognition of social groups, identities and communities whose voices have been suppressed by the dominant colonial power. His radical multidisciplinary practice and his use of a range of media—from video to installation, sculpture, performance and drawing on paper—make him hard to pin down. He also focuses on interaction with others, in ensemble works involving orality, documentary, curating, and even organizing public programs and symposia. In this podcast, we talk to Carlos Motta about art, politics, the market, and working conditions.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with the leader, activist mother and poet Yaneth Valencia that we were unable to include the first time around.
This project by the researcher and curator Marta Echaves is structured as a web of complementary, interconnected narratives that reconstruct the silenced history of a generation marked by heroin and AIDS in post-dictatorship Spain.
Élisabeth Lebovici
Élisabeth Lebovici reflects on the AIDS crisis during the eighties, and on the crucial role of conceptual art and activism in shaping the new visual and affective paradigms which gave voice to communities that the capitalist, liquefied society was (and still is) striving to smother. We also talk about poetry, pornography, and all that art that museums balk at hanging on their walls.
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.