Son[i]a #432
Dani Zelko
Dani Zelko's printing backpack. Photo: Dani Zelko.
When you first meet him—and as part of his ritual of seducing his collaborators—Argentinian Dani Zelko introduces himself as an artist. This is less about the profession and more because of the leeway and ambiguity that art opens up in the collective imagination. And because Reunión, the shared listening-and-writing device that he launched in 2015, starts making sense only once it has been activated. Not long after first meeting, Dani describes himself as a “languageist”: someone to whom language is not just a tool, but a home.
With a protocol that can be summed up in just a few lines, Reunión came into being as an experiment in “translation from the outer to the inner ear”. An exercise in transcribing the spoken word on paper, in real time, as a means to collectively produce, on-site, “books for political intervention and for making friends.” As a strategy that uses intimacy with strangers and competes for attention to words, silences, pauses, breath, and poetry, Reunión has been put to work on the streets, on the northern border, in Mapuche territory, and wherever urgent writing has taken it.
The friendships forged in Mapuche territory and a quest to discover his own lineage led Dani Zelko to the writing-exorcism of Oreja madre: mi cuestión judía (Mother Ear: My Jewish question), a book of correspondence with the living and the dead, with victims and perpetrators. In it, writing becomes both a refuge and a narrative from the perspective of his sense of Jewishness, in the midst of the State of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people and the advance of neoliberalism and racism in Argentina.
In this podcast, we talk to Dani Zelko about the shift from the mandate of the voice to rituals of listening. We also talk about making room for the uncomfortable, about embracing moments of conflict and mourning, about the difference between guilt and responsibility, and about the social and political need to find unifying forces that lubricate the political sphere. We also touch on the possibility of new generations opening up to collective self-criticism, and on Dani’s faith in books and in multiple, chosen lineages. All of this, amidst nervous laughter and breath.
In collaboration with:
Conversation: Violeta Ospina and Anna Ramos. Script: Violeta Ospina and Anna Ramos. Sound production: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros. Sounds: RWM sound library.
ATTRIBUTION/NON-COMMERCIAL/SHARE-ALIKE 4.0 INTERNATIONAL (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
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