Son[i]a #394 Ona Bros

Ona Bros (b. Lleida, 1977) is a visual artist and researcher. Her work emerges from situated processes, queer practices and embodied explorations that aim to place politics at the centre of life—in other words, to put life at the centre in a political way. With a transfeminist vision and feet firmly planted outside the frame, Ona embraces unease as a methodology with which to make a place for herself, to “gain a voice”. For Ona, this involves a political and experiential understanding of what goes on behind the camera, as well as creating common vocabularies, not taking expressions for granted and focusing on meanings. Aware of the performativity of words and the vividness and agency of images, Ona short-circuits the dominant narratives shaped by language and by the politics of visual representation. And she does so through a somatic lens, looking at how they affect our bodies and the worlds they give rise to.

In this podcast, images are a device for weaving complex relationships, with agency and a host of constituent agents that modulate their meaning. Ona Bros charts an almost chronological story of her life, in which babbling, impropriety and questioning sustain other imaginaries and other ways of being and relating. Direct action, images that stain, ethical porn, gestating bodies and communities of ice create space for the constant sense of not belonging and the need to sustain life.