Son[i]a #465
Marta Echaves
![Son[i]a #465](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Keta-control-1-1280x1706.jpg)
Marta Echaves is a researcher, writer, and cultural producer. Her first book, Químicas piedades (Chemical Mercies), is the culmination of her long-term research into the ways we relate to drugs, and the worlds and production paradigms that they make possible. The near-total adoption of psychological terminology to explain what causes us pain has shaped a reality in which there seems to be no outside of therapeutic language. Against this backdrop, the history of ketamine emerges as a kind of connective tissue that can illuminate cultural scenarios and allegories across multiple times and places: from botanical desiccation for the mass transport of substances during the colonial era to the slippery practice of bioprospecting, by way of the pharmaco-mystical rituals of 1970s subcultures, the elasticity of legal frameworks, and the psychedelic antidepressants flooding Silicon Valley offices.
In this podcast, we speak to Marta Echaves about the political persistence of the mystery and multidimensionality of substances. We follow a chemical pendulum between trust and distrust, while exploring writing practices, epistles, and fabulation as methodology. We look at the temporal undulations and curves of the dance floor and Marcia Moore’s shimmering visions as fragments of a genealogy yet to be written, sparking a conversation about ways in which we might challenge spirituality today, in an openly antagonistic way.
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This project by the researcher and curator Marta Echaves is structured as a web of complementary, interconnected narratives that reconstruct the silenced history of a generation marked by heroin and AIDS in post-dictatorship Spain.