Son[i]a #428

In this podcast, we talk to artist and feral economist Kate Rich about administration, entrepreneurship and feral vocabularies. We consider the cycles of learning and unlearning required to open up the imaginary of cooperation and business, and access their enduring emotional content. We recap experiences of shared bank accounts, economic abstractions as temporary hiding places, greyness as camouflage or cover, and acknowledge administrative practice as the inevitable soundtrack of our lives that is waiting to be reimagined. 

In this podcast, we sit with Laura Benítez Valero under a glass ceiling that never quite cracks, to talk about its unshakeable foundations, the question of class, and the scaffold of the meritocracy. Anger and shame are the emotions provoked by the emergence of this perverse and oppressive system, which reproduces inequalities generation after generation, until they become ingrained. From the same perspective, Laura Benítez Valero proudly recounts the legacy of a community-based education in the struggle of women who support families and children. She also talks about music and dance as catalysts and points of escape; and about research projects that take place outside of academia, in the form of erratic, intuitive and affective methodologies in which enjoyment plays a central role. 

In this podcast, researcher, curator, and organizer Vaida Stepanovaitė guides us through some of the intricate lineages of past and present trade unions in the post-Soviet Baltic states, while also drawing inspiration from international movements such as the Art Workers’ Coalition and W.A.G.E., as well as from recent collective efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic. She reflects on the devaluation of labour and people within the context of “uber-economics” or the gig economy, on the toll, precarity takes on the tired bodies of workers, and on the need for radical action to foster new forms of collectivization. The struggle against inhospitable working conditions and the gaps in the social safety net affecting art workers, serves as a starting point for devising better models for arts institutions and building new solidarities in the quest for a good life.

Black feminist writer, organiser, and thinker Lola Olufemi's political and creative work has been shaped by over a decade of feminist activism—both within institutions and far beyond them. In this podcast, she invites us to embrace non-linearity, atemporal connections, and fragmentation—both in our organising and in how we write and research. She reflects on feminist legacies, the need to think beyond binaries of success and failure, and how imagination is not a luxury but a political necessity. We also explore the ethics of solidarity, the material conditions of care, and the radical power of listening—to each other, to the past, and to the unheard.