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.
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