Son[i]a
Aram Lee
Amsterdam-based Korean artist Aram Lee works across moving image, installation, performance and research, tracing how histories of occupation, colonial violence and militarisation remain embedded in objects, bodies, landscapes and ecological matter. Her practice is particularly interested in the material afterlives of these histories: externalised memories of occupied land, the persistence of toxic substances, and the ways in which institutions attempt to preserve, classify and control the remains of the past. Ethnographical museums become a particularly charged site for this inquiry, revealing paradoxes in which practices presented as preservation can also perpetuate violence. In this podcast, we talk to Aram Lee about poisoned lands, toxic materials, restitution, and the use of artistic mediation as a way of making otherwise hidden continuities of violence, toxicity and memory perceptible.
Silvia Zayas
In this podcast, we talk to choreographer and visual artist Silvia Zayas about mind films, underwater somatic practices, and the effects of sound frequencies on matter. We imagine what it means to film with a body-camera: when the filming device adheres to the skin, plunging in, abandoning technique in favour of clumsiness, error, and low-res. In other words, what it means to film with a body that does not know where it is going. We also reflect on the editing process when queerness ceases to be merely the subject matter and becomes embodied in the actual modes of production, and on a kind of eroticism of the artistic process that is grounded in affect, intimacy, sensuality, mystery, and a refusal to control everything.
Shuruq Harb
In this podcast, Palestinan artist and writer Shuruq Harb opens up her methodologies and research processes: from long, open-ended conversations and collective walks, to speculative readings of landscape and informal, poetic, playful gestures that make sense of the fragmentation of time, space and everyday life in Palestine. Across the conversation, editing emerges as a method of thinking: a slow, almost athletic practice of arranging images, voices and tenses so that information never overwhelms affect, and poetry does not abandon history. Harb insists on a cinema that is formally simple while being emotionally resonant and critically precise; a space where stories do not necessarily provide answers, but open onto shared zones of speculation, uncertainty and survival. With bedside radios and PASSIA calendars as companions, we also talk about the fuzziness of thinking amid the incessant bombardment of news updates, and about ways of overcoming paralysis and coping with the fractures of the present.
blanca arias
In this podcast, esearcher, curator, educator, mediator and archivist blanca arias draws on numerous friends and references to discuss guts, lungs, mishearings, and her fondness for pink. We talk about historical justice and the lack of feminist critical theory literature on the image, and we ask ourselves what it might mean to ‘tenderise’ an institution. We talk about proprioception, the inclination towards the other, and the material conditions that determine how far a body, a practice, or a book can go. From ekphrasis to listening, we touch on the senses and the politics of space, pausing before we interpret, lingering with things a little longer, and pondering the nature of what is before us.
T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault
In this podcast, we talk with Jas and T.L. Cowan, coauthors of Heavy Processing (2024), about their early ambition to digitally chart every TFQ cabaret in existence, beginning with Cabaret Commons. From there, we explore the dialectics between computational logics and digital archives, and move into the thick of digital research ethics. We delve into risks, refusals, feelings, ephemeralities, and intimacies. Their deep humor and care animate a self-reflexive, collaborative approach to knowledge-making – one that generously shares what forms their past trajectories in relation to the temporal crises of today and the ethics of time itself.
Son[i]a functions as a mirror and a sounding board for MACBA itself. Harnessing the synergies arising from the presence of the many voices, activities, and sounds that circulate in the museum, Son[i]a presents in-depth interviews with artists, curators, critics, activists, and thinkers, on a range of topics ranging from art to philosophy, by way of politics, activism, artistic research, music, and film, and everything in between. Son[i]a was the first RWM programme, launched on 2 May 2006.