Radio Web MACBA

In this podcast, writer, historian, educator, and curator Samia Henni offers insights into her wide-ranging curatorial and research projects, which delve into key topics such as the role of archives in reconstructing histories, the desert as a colonial construct, and the ongoing impact of colonial toxicity on landscapes and communities. We talk about nuclear tests in Algeria, about contradictions, war propaganda and traumatic exhibitions, and about the absences in colonial archives. 

In this podcast, singer and composer Maya Al-Khaldi and Qanun player, DJ and producer Sarouna talk about the Palestinian music scenes and about their own musical approaches and artistic practices. They question the electronic music genre from a decolonial point of view and talk about the issues around fusion and the exoticization of cultural expression. Folklore emerges as a complex and often disputed concept. The conversation touches on the tensions between the archive and lived experience, the challenges of non-existent or inaccessible archives, and the importance of preserving cultural heritage. They also reflect on the crucial need for collective mourning as Palestinians and talk about the weight of imposed guilt, and about resilience. Sarouna’s thoughtfully captured field recordings of everyday moments in Palestine are woven through the podcast.

Ren Loren Britton is an artist, researcher, activist, and practitioner whose work focuses on reimagining access, and anti-ableist cultural practices exploring non-normative time, linguistic nonlinear structures, at the intersections of arts, technology and pedagogy holding spaces for diverse temporalities. In this podcast, we delve into Radical access, Access riders, Access servers and the edges of access. We also think of access as feelings, access as a mood and a-temporal desire. We also talk about stretching time, the slipperiness of the lived experience, trans*disabled lineages, histories of other past(s), the burden of remembering, the weight of datasets and unforgetting as an act of caring.

Undead Matter is an unfolding conversation about where life lies in the ever-turning matter of our universe, as it rhythmically resurfaces over millennia. In this new episode, artist, Oreet Ashery speaks with paleontologist Tori Herridge about discoveries in the permafrost, genetic legacies, cloning from the deep past, fertility and the unborn.

Can we think through listening? Seth-Kim Cohen, Christoph Cox, Julian Henriques, Casey O’Callaghan, Peter Szendy and Salomé Voegelin discuss why thinking should not be at odds with resonating…

Artist and filmmaker, Shezad Dawood speaks with social and geopolitical anthropologist Mark Nuttall, whose work is embedded in circumpolar rural communities, tracing the entanglements between climate change, extractive industries and identity of place. They discuss the accumulated residues, ecological cosmologies and shifting futures that have emerged from the deepest corners of the oceans, the icy subsurface and geological entanglements of Greenland’s complex landscapes and the lives they hold. Creation myths, told by Greenlandic storyteller Maria Kreutzmann, bubble up from the dark depths of the ocean and rub up against dramatic changes in the landscape throughout the past century.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with researcher and transdisciplinary curator Yaiza Hernández. We unpack the relationship between militarism and tourism by looking at zonified border territories that also model touristification. Through this lens, we also see that the tourist resort replicates the architectural layout of the colony, offering safe spaces for privilege, wealth, and whiteness. Then, we take a look at the current form of the museum model, warning of certain symptoms suggesting it is reaching a terminal stage. We wrap up with a digression into Yaiza’s understanding of cultural appropriation.