Son[i]a #359 Andrea Valdés

Andrea Valdés is a writer and journalist. Her publications include the six-volume fanzine La línea sin fin, with David Bestué, and the book Distraídos venceremos. Usos y derivas en la escritura autobiográfica, in which she looks at the uses of autobiographical writing in extreme life situations. In recent years, her research into autofiction has connected writer Carla Lonzi and artist Lee Lozano, two bodies affected by vectors and historical fault lines associated with feminisms, the transformation of work, and the emergence of systematic ways of abandoning the art world. Instead of giving in to the impulse to slam the door and walk away from it all, Andrea explores the trappings of these kinds of movements, as well as later historiographical readings through the lenses of adulation and contempt, and the structural question of who is really able to leave.

In this podcast we talk to Andrea Valdés about pure writing, about heterodoxy, and about spatial optimism. We open up the metaphor of soft tools, and the semantic resonance of organs—be they tongues or genitals—trapped by the technological rudiments of machines. We discuss the use of tape recorders, orality and writing, and the research of Rivolta Femminile self-awareness groups, which tried to find a space for a different kind of speech in a private, female-only environment. The conversation was recorded at Hangar in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, as one of the first moves towards a line research that Andrea had continued to work on to this day.