Son[i]a #401
Marwa Arsanios
Marwa Arsanios, “Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part IV”, 2022. Video Still.
Lebanese artist, researcher, and filmmaker Marwa Arsanios has a multidisciplinary practice that is closely aligned with movements and communities at the intersection between ecological thinking, land struggles, and feminist politics. She understands art as a set of relations, connecting spaces of sociabillity through strategies and devices that allow communities to think collectively about the urgent questions of the contemporary world. This methodology permeates her projects: from her early days working at 98weeks, the self-organized artist-run space in Beirut she co-founded with her cousin Mirene Arsanios, to her ongoing film series “Who’s Afraid of Ideology” where film—and the film set itself—becomes a space where politics is not only discussed but also produced, enacted and transmitted.
In this podcast, Arsanios unpacks the many conversational tactics embedded in her modes of working in the gaps between art and activism. We talk about reading groups, the film object, solidarity as a practice, and using the art economy to bring communities and movements together.
Conversation: Anna Ramos. Script and sound production: Albert Tarrats. Voice Over: Javiera Cadiz.
Eva Maria Fjellheim
Jodi Dean
Jodi Dean talks about communism as a still-latent project, about the Party as a scalable global form, about dystopian municipalism, anamorphic ecologies, and liberal democracies, about Not An Alternative and Liberate Tate as examples of sustainable activism practices at museums, about desires, enthusiasm, and trust and about the emotions captured inside social media.
Haig Aivazian
Through media such as lectures, performance, video, drawing, installation, and sculpture, Haig Aivazian’s multifaceted works intricately blend the personal and the geopolitical as well as micro and macro narratives. They uncover or perhaps even fabricate complex threads, timelines and visual networks with multiple layers of meaning and ambiguity. His stories are intended to puzzle, reveal intangible connections, and evoke a sense of ghostly friction among conflicting ideas. In this podcast, we talk to Haig Aivazian about counter-propaganda, sports, blackouts, Palestine, fugitivity and what he calls “the dumping grounds of democracy”.
Akram Zaatari
In FONS ÀUDIO #48, Akram Zaatari contextualises his work 'Nature morte', which is part of the MACBA Collection. This film was produced for the 2008 exhibition 'Les Inquiets – 5 artistes sous la pression de la guerre' at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, which explored the war in the Middle East and its representations.