Son[i]a #389 Françoise Vergès
- 00:01 Is there water in your tap?
- 04:50 Who cleaned this place?
- 10:00 Why are these women so removed from the political debate?
- 14:31 Economies of exhaustion
- 23:25 How is good air distributed? Asymmetric access to public health and pollution exposure
- 33:05 Racial hierarchies in medicine
- 34:42 The politics of cleanliness, hygiene, safety and protection
- 38:48 The denial of vital needs is also fabricated through history
- 42:19 Vital needs: water, food, housing and breathing.
- 45:06 Creolisation from below
- 50:10 How to think of tomorrow from what we know from the past and the present?
- 54:45 Museums are crime scenes, but you never see the blood
- 62:50 The museum is a social space but it’s managed to hide the social
- 69:42 A museum without objects
- 73:05 Is it decolonisation or is it social justice?
- 76:19 A museum as a library, an open library
- 82:10 Returning objects and restoration
- 86:50 What is our heritage? What else do we need to think otherwise?
Françoise Vergès (París, 1952) is a political scientist, historian, film producer, independent curator, activist and public educator. Her work reflects an exemplary commitment to tracing the persistence of colonialism and slavery into the present, mapping out networks of transnational solidarity within Europe and in the global south, as well as forming and enacting an anti-racist feminist ethics. Even though, reflecting on her expansive lifework, she says: “I am much more interested in cooking than writing books.”
In this podcast, Françoise Vergès unpacks the social and environmental politics of cleaning and waste, charting and questioning temporal and spatial interactions that create a neutral site of deprivation, exhaustion and exploitation. She builds upon the ideas presented in her essay “Capitalocene, Waste, Race, and Gender” published in e-flux journal in 2019, which sheds light on the economy and politics of exhaustion, pointing out the role of racial capitalism in the climate crisis. Vergès suggests a political re-reading and understanding of vital needs and natural elements through notions of cleaning, hygiene and medicine, and raises revolutionary questions about the prefabricated assumptions of justice and social transformation through re-thinking the museum.
In collaboration with Acción cultural/Programa PICE
Conversation: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros, pantea and Anna Ramos. Script and sound production: pantea. Intro: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros. Voice over: Javiera Cadiz. Sounds: RWM Working Group, sounds from INA GRM.
Image: Piles of waste in Thilafushi, 2012. Source: Dying Regime @Wikimedia Commons