Son[i]a #395
Imani Mason Jordan
Imani Mason Jordan & Felix Taylor, "Earthly Accomplice". Photo: Anna Fàbrega.
Imani Mason Jordan is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, editor, curator and plant lover, heavily invested in collective practices and DIWO from a Black feminist perspective. Committed to political organizing and popular education, Imani is also an outspoken prison abolitionist, who embraces emotional and political veracity as a strategy to convey “what we know to be true”, and as a tool for harm reduction and for dismantling power structures. “What does testimony mean for those of us who are never believed?”, they ask. Through their work, Imani deep dives into language, poetics, orality and recitation. They understand text and oration as a space for experimentation and political attunement, and listening as an opportunity for healing. In their writing, critical theory, epistemic disobedience, memory, testimony and trauma take different forms and shapes, such as essays, articles, poems, plays, love letters.
In this podcast 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.
Conversation: Javiera Cádiz, pantea and Anna Ramos. Script and sound production: André Chêdas. Voice: Hiuwai Chu. Sounds: RWM Working Group, from the Willem Twee Studios library in Den Bosch.
CC BY-NC-ND 2.5 ES DEED. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5.
Isaac Julien
The work of Isaac Julien moves through liminal spaces. Overlapping zones between photography, film, and installation; choreography and dance; poetry and music… and the infinite possible versions, iterations, and variations that can emerge from systematic work with the archive. Intersections in which fiction, documentary, narrative, and radicality converge to produce aesthetically meticulous and politically powerful imaginaries and stories that challenge white heterosexual film conventions through their temporalities, narrative construction, and aesthetic forms. In this podcast, Isaac Julien talks about the need to give a voice and body to dissident black identity and desire in the cinematic imaginary, about expanded cinema and choreographic montage; and about his constant shifts between the worlds of art, video art, and film.
Marissa Malik
It’s tempting to describe Marissa Malik’s practice as a crossroads—one where music production intersects with mysticism, DJing and astrology. But the way she talks about these complementary aspects instead suggests that they are all on a sort of Möbius strip, a continuum with no beginning or end, on which they harmonically coexist and feed back on each other. This paradoxical geometry relies on a worldview and a critical gaze that has allowed Marissa to explore and put her own spin on the correlation between language, racial segregation and gender, especially in the framework of diaspora communities like her own. We sat down with Marissa Malik to talk about language, rituals, migration, mysticism, barriers, queerness and sexuality in her musical domain.
Françoise Vergès
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 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.