Son[i]a #389
Françoise Vergès
![Son[i]a #389](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/piles_of_waste_in_thilafushi_2012_1-1280x849.jpeg)
Image: Piles of waste in Thilafushi, 2012. Source: Dying Regime @Wikimedia Commons
Françoise Vergès (París, 1952) is a political scientist, historian, film producer, independent curator, activist and public educator. Her work reflects an exemplary commitment to tracing the persistence of colonialism and slavery into the present, mapping out networks of transnational solidarity within Europe and in the global south, as well as forming and enacting an anti-racist feminist ethics. Even though, reflecting on her expansive lifework, she says: “I am much more interested in cooking than writing books.”
In this podcast, Françoise Vergès unpacks the social and environmental politics of cleaning and waste, charting and questioning temporal and spatial interactions that create a neutral site of deprivation, exhaustion and exploitation. She builds upon the ideas presented in her essay “Capitalocene, Waste, Race, and Gender” published in e-flux journal in 2019, which sheds light on the economy and politics of exhaustion, pointing out the role of racial capitalism in the climate crisis. Vergès suggests a political re-reading and understanding of vital needs and natural elements through notions of cleaning, hygiene and medicine, and raises revolutionary questions about the prefabricated assumptions of justice and social transformation through re-thinking the museum.
In collaboration with Acción cultural/Programa PICE
Conversation: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros, pantea and Anna Ramos. Script and sound production: pantea. Intro: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros. Voice over: Javiera Cadiz. Sounds: RWM Working Group, sounds from INA GRM.
Imani Mason Jordan
In this podcast interdisciplinary writer, artist, editor, curator and plant lover Imani Mason Jordan reflects on the conflicting meanings of community, which they sum up as “ a feeling and a relationship”. Finding guidance in the writings of Audre Lorde (and others)—through collective reading and listening—, Imani makes an urgent call for action, in order to disrupt and overcome the numbing of our emotions. Cadence, resonance, repetition and the bodily urgency of protest speeches operate in their artistic vocabulary as key tools for world-breaking, as well as world-making.
Elvira Espejo Ayca
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.
Flavia Dzodan
We talk to Argentinian writer and researcher Flavia Dzodan about fashion, opulence, peripheries, phrenology, taxonomies, canons of beauty, luxury fakes, and migrant detention centres. An intense journey that touches on her personal history and includes references to other writers, notes on her methodology, and a few potshots at centres of power.
Walter Mignolo
The Argentine semiotician Walter Mignolo talks about the relation between the construction of history and the perspective of power, as imposed by the West.
Fatima El-Tayeb
Fatima El-Tayeb talks about the need to reassess Europe’s internalist narrative and the discourse of integration. She evaluates the role of race in the construction of this account and argues for the creation and recovery of archives as a strategy for developing other types of narratives.