Specials

This new episode of Roc Jiménez de Cisneros' OBJECTHOOD series features conversations with Diego Falconi, Rick Dolphijn, Dave Phillips, and music by Kali Malone. A spiral-shaped trip about fire, burning, ashes, rituals, cooking, food, and jungles. Though it is also about everything that lies in between and beneath each and every one of those things. The invisible micropolitics of food in the military; the symbolic charge of ashes, solid remains of an intangible object – fire – which has shaped this planet for millions of years; the untold gender-related motifs behind the Aimara genocide; a circular, cyclical perception of time; or the role and relevance of ecosystems, even beyond the good old wildlife cliché – because, you know, “everything is an ecosystem, at the end of the day”. 

We talk to Karo Moret, Diego Falconí and Lucía Piedra Galarraga interculturality, multiculturality, and migrant sit-ins. They share ideas on cosmopolitics, the Hispanic world, atavisms, and Afrofuturism; on El Cid's beard, the Royal Spanish Academy, and taking academia to the street. They examine the ways in which a transvestite theory of childhood challenges the imaginaries embodied in literature and explore the legal loopholes and the counter-routes of knowledge that could allow us, collectively, to come together in the south. 

We talk to Diego Falconí Travez, Lucía Piedra Galarraga and Karo Moret about slavery and love, the Caribbeanization of identities, and violence as a potential resource. They discuss affects, phobias, autophagies, and unsettling objects. And they examine the Latino world in relation to the mask of gay culture, coming out of the closet as a liberal promise, and resent(i)ment as a circular form that prevents memory from disappearing. 

We talk to Efraín Foglia, founding member of guifi.net and researcher, teacher, and designer of physical and digital interaction platforms, about the challenges of the XRCB project and about how radio is spilling over into the digital world. And we do so from the perspective of our context, honing in on specific instances of radio activism and experimentation: from the struggles for telecommunication infrastructure, free radio, and FM advocacy to community radio stations in Latin America, by way of digital communities and the internet radio boom.

We talk with Lucía Piedra Galarraga, Diego Falconí Travez and Karo Moret from the Study Group on Afro/Black Ideas, Practices, and Activisms about altars, ekekos, nefandos, Saint Barbara, and Valdivia's Siamese twins. They turn their attention to the politics of hair, talk about sugar as the star product plying the Caribbean routes, and acknowledge the usefulness of ashes in proving the extermination of the ancient Andean sodomite communities.

In FONS ÀUDIO #49, Peter Downsbrough takes his works from the MACBA Collection as a springboard to talk about a relationship with photography spanning almost half a century, and about how it fits into the jigsaw puzzle of techniques and disciplines that make up his artistic vocabulary. We talk about space, cities, invisible lines, and the critical attitude that runs subtly through his practice.

This project by the researcher and curator Marta Echaves is structured as a web of complementary, interconnected narratives that reconstruct the silenced history of a generation marked by heroin and AIDS in post-dictatorship Spain.

Lithium mines, Trotskyist sects, black boxes, planetary exodus, augmented architecture, a city as big as the entire planet Earth, the mythology of Area 51. McKenzie Wark, Liam Young and Mette Edvardsen explore these and other ideas in an attempt to think about space as more than just a medium. Space as object.

Media studies expert Matthew Fuller talks about the origins and legacy of pirate radio culture in London, focusing on this fertile period of DIY resurgence, when radio resumed a prominent role in a scene hungry for alternative channels before the arrival of the internet.

Things that are more than things: frozen embodiments of social relations, petrifications of desires and energies, replicas disguised as everyday objects. Images, microwave, post-its, money, inhalers, cheese. We speak with Hito Steyerl, Helen Hester and Roula Partheniou of these and other ideas. Because things are never quite the way they seem.