Son[i]a #325 Cabello/Carceller

We shared some mates with val flores as we chatted about queer pedagogy, writing, and microactivism. We touched on teaching practice as political practice, on queer dissidence as a means to activate deheterosexualisng know-how, and on the need to inhabit and write our identities in new ways that break down gender, race, and class boundaries.

Fefa Vila Nuñez is a queer feminist ‘artivist’, sociologist, mother, essayist, teacher, and many other things. Fefa was one of the founders of the lesbian collective LSD (1993-1998), which was, together with La Radical Gai, one of the touchstones of queer artivism in Spain in the 1990s. Through their political-artistic actions, LSD and La Radi defended new ways of understanding the body, sex, life, death, desire, friendship, family and work relationships, and political action. In this podcast, Fefa Vila reflects aloud on queerness as a state of radical estrangement, which is constantly being redefined. She also talks about the need to experience other forms of sociability, about other affective-relational models and about motherhood.

In this podcast we talk to the queer collective El Palomar about art, dissidence, and pedagogy. We dive deep into their strategies for self-care and resilience. We talk about the importance of producing disobedient, abject, situated genealogies, despite the obstacles to remembering the past in Spain. We share the experience and trauma of embodied research, and reread the pandemic experience through the lens of the lessons of the silenced AIDS crisis. Touch and queer parties emerge as political possibility and bastions of resistance where drives are liberated, limits are transgressed, and the hostilities of a hetero-centric world disappear, albeit temporarily.

Lucía Egaña is an artist, writer, teacher, and anti-racist transfeminist activist. Lucía is a misfit researcher who for years has been implementing protocols designed to self-institute practices and spaces underpinned by a collective approach. Her methodology is undisciplined (or, as she says, subnormal), championing the bizarre, dirty, and marginal as a fertile testing ground for various relational, educational, and/or artistic devices. In this podcast we talk to Lucía Egaña about pedagogical processes, bibliographic dissent, wild writing, and the generative and affirmative potential of rage. We discuss identity politics, single-sex spaces, friendship as an engine for research, and the power of processes organised around informality and affects.