Son[i]a #352 Flavia Dzodan
- 00:01 My theory
- 03:38 Quinsy Gario
- 08:49 Immigration detention centre: a first-person experience
- 21:47 Looking in from the periphery
- 25:47 The coloniality of the algorithm
- 30:58 A kind of algorithmic phrenology
- 36:17 Fake opulence: a moment of disruption
- 40:16 Sumptuary laws
- 43:12 Aesthetic classification systems
- 47:46 The present through a historical lens
- 51:54 Authenticity as a religious experience
- 58:09 The copy and the original
- 60:42 The essence of the authentic
- 64:28 Molecular authentication
- 68:51 La Califa, fake Yves Saint Laurent jackets
- 74:03 Collecting
- 78:55 The Kibbe Body Type Test
- 87:44 Other uses of technology
- 89:40 Collaboration spaces
- 94:48 Writing
- 98:31 Improvising
- 101:09 Coda: Fashion brands burn shoes every year
Although much of her work comes out of academia—specifically the Sandberg Instituut in Amstardam—Flavia Dzodan takes pains to point out the non-academic nature of her practice. Flavia describes herself as a “scavenger” of theory, an outsider who collects and assembles bits and pieces of existing ideas and hypotheses to construct her own discourse. In her case, this discourse is a sharp and critical analysis of algorithms and digital culture at the intersection of race and gender politics. She places particular emphasis on the way in which the colonial agenda of the past mutates and persists in our digital tools, cultural products, surveillance systems, networks, and data flows.
We talk to Flavia Dzodan about fashion, opulence, peripheries, phrenology, taxonomies, canons of beauty, luxury fakes, and migrant detention centres. An intense journey that touches on her personal history and includes references to other writers, notes on her methodology, and a few potshots at centres of power.