Son[i]a #340 Andrea Soto Calderón

Andrea Soto Calderón is a Chilean-born, Barcelona-based Doctor of Philosophy, writer and teacher. As well as numerous articles on philosophy and art, she has written the books Le travail des images—with Jacques Rancière—, La performatividad de las imágenes, and the recently publishedImaginación material. Her work involves extensive, in-depth research into the way images work and the problems of technique. Her explorations are always dialogical, picking up the threads of experiences and dialogues that come up in conversations, assemblies, classes, and laboratories. Andrea’s “inapparent” practice allows her to think in terms of the critical power and potential of images “between”images. Since 2017, together with Valentín Roma, she directs The Performativity of Images research project at La Virreina, Centre de la Imatge, which seeks to open up images so that thinking can take place. 

In this podcast, we talk to Andrea Soto Calderón about images and power, about the material imagination, desire, and oikonomia. Walking barefoot along this path, we come across minor architectures and silent revolutions. We also consider the possibility of a different geometry of politics, one that turns its back on basic categories of thought such as “fixing”, “establishing” and “substantiating” in favour of inexplicable notions that simultaneously are and are not. Taking this idea further, Andrea suggests replacing the idea of “strategy” and thinking instead about “ways of doing”. She also explores the notion of event as something that cannot be planned but can be worked on, thus pointing out that process is necessary for transformation. And alerting us to the fact that what deceives us is less of a problem than what seduces us.