Son[i]a
Cocky Eek
In this podcast, artist and teacher Cocky Eek dives into the conception and development of her inflatables—a delicate balance of fabric, air, and anchoring—as well as the challenges of preserving such fleeting, fragile materials and moments. Moving through mud, wind, and sand, she reflects on the ambiguous place her work occupies within fine art discourse, and speculates on how altering our sensory perception might, in fact, renew it.
Ameneh Solati
In this podcast, artist and researcher Ameneh Solati reflects on the marshes as revolutionary landscapes in southern Iraq, the relationship between environment and resistance, and the challenges of researching a territory that remains partially inaccessible and historically underdocumented. The conversation also touches on collective spatial investigation, collaborations with activists and communities, and experimental forms of mapping that rethink the relationship between humans, water and land.
Rolando Vázquez Melken
In this podcast, we go into listening mode with Rolando Vázquez Melken. He proposes countering the modern-colonial aesthetic—the one that organises representation and governs our bodies and our gazes—by liberating aesthesis, or reopening the field of the sensible. The idea is to make space for other ways of seeing, listening, feeling, and living. To make room for ancestral knowledge and forms that have been historically erased, subordinated, or appropriated by the modern regime. Here, decolonial thought operates as a practice, a battlefield, an approach that walks alongside other forms of struggle and rings out in many voices: both ancestral voices and the voices that are still forging a path in the present, such as those of Walter Mignolo, María Lugones, Enrique Dussel, Gloria Wekker, and Catherine Walsh, to name just a few.
Rehana Zaman
In this podcast, we talk to the artist, filmmaker and educator Rehana Zaman about diaspora, collectivity, and infrastructures of care; about the studio as a social testing ground, and about film as both process and result. We reflect on alliances, representation, polyvocality, and authorship. We also discuss institutional agendas and the political urgency of coming together. We consider how to sustain the power of such encounters without slipping into empty gestures, and how to maintain artistic practices grounded in listening, humour, responsibility, and being together.
Fadya Salfiti
In this podcast, Palestinian cultural organiser and activist Fadya Salfiti unfolds the layers of her trajectory –from Kuwait to the United States and then to Jerusalem– to reflect on what it means to go back, to take root, and to struggle in an occupied land. From her situated experience, she dismantles the “humanitarian” and “developmentalist” façade of international aid: how colonial philanthropy depoliticises struggles, fragments the territory, gathers data, monitors, imposes external priorities, and generates dependency. Against this, she proposes other ways of sustaining life and collective projects: networking, self-organising, solidarity among organisations, and the creation of projects such as Owneh Initiative and Rawa, which seek to liberate resources, language, political discourse and imagination. Here, memory acts as insubordination, return as a daily practice, and community organising as a radical wager on Palestine’s future.