Son[i]a #279 Élisabeth Lebovici
- 00:01 Silence is something that needs to be challenged
- 00:52 Intro
- 03:21 Silence = Death
- 05:00 Audre Lorde: Your silence will not protect you
- 06:00 I work with free associations and experience
- 07:02 In the impossibility of speaking
- 09:02 Silence is linked to many activities I love
- 09:52 Poetry essentially has to be spoken
- 12:02 Emptying the words. Poetry as a space
- 14:20 Poetry and activism in the streets: Banners
- 15:39 The lips and the Museum. Zoe Leonard
- 17:45 A Museum is always half empty. We (women) are not there
- 19:45 How do those lips speak?
- 23:55 Act up. AIDS crisis. Why is anybody paying attention? Politics in our bodies
- 26:27 Invisible communities. Invisibility of the lesbians
- 31:42 Is not about saying that we should be diverse, but just to surrender to the fact that we are.
- 34:59 I use the word lesbian. I don't say queer
- 37:55 Conceptual practices, pop culture, AIDS and activism
- 41:10 Liquidification of society. Liquidification of images. Intimate liquids
- 43:44 The eighties, a moment of desublimation
Sounds taken from Anna Irina Russell's blind foley library
When you’re in the business of recording podcasts at a museum, things can’t get much worse than having Élisabeth Leboviciat the microphone when your voice recorder decides to add noise and distortion, and not knowing what’s going on or how to fix it. With her characteristic humour and lucidity, Lebovici incorporated the mishap into her discourse and our conversation flowed smoothly, skirting artifacts and cold sweats. The fragility of the moment, words erased and forgotten, and our determination to keep recording are now part of this document.
Élisabeth Lebovici is an art historian, critic, and activist. She was culture editor of the French newspaper Libération, and is currently the writer of the blog "Le Beau Vice". In her latest book, "Ce que le sida m'a fait: art et activisme à la fin du XXe siècle", she draws on personal experience to reconstruct the effects of the AIDS crisis on our ways of living in the world, interacting with each other, and representing ourselves. Over the years, embracing activism and artistic practices, Élisabeth Lebovici has woven a history of feminist, lesbian, queer, and dissident art that diverges from the dominant narratives of patriarchal heteronormativity.
In this podcast, Élisabeth Lebovici invites us to engage with silence. A silence that sometimes inspires and accompanies us, but more often imprisons and isolates us. Silence = Death, said an eighties ACT UP slogan. Lebovici reflects on the AIDS crisis during that decade, and on the crucial role of conceptual art and activism in shaping the new visual and affective paradigms which gave voice to communities that the capitalist, liquefied society was (and still is) striving to smother. We also talk about poetry, pornography, and all that art that museums balk at hanging on their walls.