Son[i]a #332 Maite Garbayo-Maeztu

Cabello/Carceller is the artist duo Helena Cabello and Ana Carceller. Since the early nineties, they have been questioning the arbitrariness and restrictions imposed by gender divisions on our bodies, spaces, representations and behaviour. In this podcast Cabello/Carceller infiltrate the arts institution and show how queer voices are systematically excluded from spaces of power, as well as museums and collections. Through their work, they invite us to reconsider the spaces we live in and leave, in order to queer them and turn them into transitional, unproductive places – sometimes melancholy, sometimes liberating – from which to imagine and activate new kinds of existence. Together, we activate the political potentiality of bodies, affects, festivity and collectivity. But we also acknowledge the solitary revolt of discordant bodies who, by their mere presence, are already doing politics

Griselda Pollock talks about her involvement in the Women’s Movement in England in the seventies, and about the points of convergence between feminism and art history. Pollock advocates the need to decentralise and diversify knowledge, and to design resistance strategies specific to each socio-political context. And, last but not least, also reflects on memory technologies, trauma, Oedipal and mother-child relationships, narratives of progress, and Bracha Ettinger’s matrixial ethics.

Laura Mulvey contextualises, updates, and elucidates on the far-reaching impact of her key text "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", where she coined the notion of the “male gaze” in classic Hollywood cinema and addressed the power asymmetry in representation and assigned gender roles, thus emphasising the patriarchal ideological agenda of the American film industry. At the same time, she opens up the debate with the notions of the “queer gaze” and the “universal whiteness” of Hollywood. Mulvey also defends orality as a form of "history from below", citing the example of “compilation films” (films that use archival footage re-written with new narrative) as a space for a new feminist film practice.