Son[i]a #398
Yaiza Hernández Velázquez
Under the promise of prosperity for impoverished and developing parts of the planet, tourism has emerged as a dominant force shaping the intricate landscapes of neoliberal capitalism. Orchestrating a complex interplay of exploitation and interdependence, the tourism industry leverages resources and labor to feed an ever-expanding, ever-expansive ouroboric structure. For decades, scholars around the world have been warning us about the detrimental effects of the travel industry on the environment and local communities.
In this podcast, we sit down with transdisciplinary researcher and curator Yaiza Hernández to get to the heart of her deep-dive research into what she has coined Terminal Tourism. Drawing upon the long tradition of academic scholarship, but also from a situated perspective as a native from the Canary Islands, Yaiza unpacks the constellation of problems orbiting the travel industry, from environmental degradation to rampant gentrification and the subsequent disruption of local infrastructures, and a whole host of other socioeconomic inequalities. We talk about kind islands, digital nomads, imperial boomerangs, platform capitalism, grand tours, museums as tourist commodities, monoculture mentality, looting with good taste, and that which Verónica Gago has called “neoliberalism from below”.
This podcast is part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.
Conversation: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros, Ricardo Cárdenas and Anna Ramos. Script: Ricardo Cárdenas. Sound production: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros. Voice over: Javiera Cadiz. Image: Teresa Arozena, "Repoussoir", 2024. Costa del silencio. Tenerife.
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International
AM Kanngieser
Political geographer and sound artist AM Kanngieser works in the coordinates between space and sound. This merging of disciplines that seems completely normal to her tends to be more perplexing to the compartmentalised world of science and academia than to the undisciplined field of artistic practice. In this podcast, we become the listeners as AM Kanngieser reflects on expanded listening, on the inaudible, and on our anthropocentrism. They talk about their long-standing interest in sound governance and dissect the many tensions that built up in the project “Climates of Listening”, which was originally based on the intention of amplifying campaigns for self-determination and self-representation in the Pacific.
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.