Son[i]a
Javier García Fernández
In this podcast, Javier García Fernández uses the three dimensions of coloniality – the coloniality of knowledge, of power, and of being – to think about what it might mean to decolonise Spain and Europe from its margins. He has coined the concept of pensar jondo – a kind of thinking that draws on flamenco cante jondo or ‘deep song’, on the social struggles of rural Andalusia and the anarchism of day labourers, and on the diasporas to Catalonia and Europe – to interpret Andalusia as a laboratory of the internal coloniality of the Spanish state: a land marked by dispossession, forced migration and fascist violence, but also by radical forms of community, cooperation and resistance. From that point, he considers how to develop political alliances that can tackle the rise of fascism today.
Carol Stampone
In this podcast, Brazilian writer and organizer Carol Stampone speaks about writing as her first experience of belonging, motherhood as a deeply transformative and often traumatic process, and the politics of empathy and compassion. She reflects on the importance of asking better questions rather than seeking definitive answers, inviting us to stay with uncertainty, to think with others, and to imagine forms of living, caring, and creating that remain open, relational, and unfinished.
Omar Jabary Salamanca
Omar Jabary Salamanca is a writer, teacher, and organizer whose work explores how power operates through the ordinary systems that shape everyday life. Omar places infrastructure at the center of his analysis. In his work, he recounts the ways infrastructures are constitutive of the logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism as well as a vital terrain for land-based practices of anti-colonial resistance. Roads, electricity, water systems, and railways become sites of struggle.
Mirna Bamieh
In this podcast, Palestinian artist Mirna Bamieh thinks aloud through disappearance: of dishes, of access to land and sea, of routes between Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. She lingers on fermentation and preservation as slow, stubborn forms of survival in times of genocide and exile, on pantries that prepare for emergency, on doors and foodways as thresholds between worlds. She speaks of immigrants’ suitcases lined with Zaatar, olive oil, and citrus, of how cooking can make a scattered life legible, and of how stories travel through potatoes passed from hand to hand in the street. Here, recipes become maps and memories, jars become time capsules, and the everyday choreography of hands in the kitchen opens a space where grief, rage, and tenderness ferment together into something that insists on remaining alive, visible, and shared.
Ebony G. Patterson
Ebony G. Patterson is an expansive artist working across painting, tapestry, photography, video, sculpture, and installation. In this podcast, she reflects on the paradoxes that animate her practice and how she uses them to entice -and unsettle- the viewer. Drawing on pop culture, art history, and pageantry, Patterson confronts social and racial inequality and the persistent brutality embedded in postcolonial and working-class spaces. Her work blurs the boundaries between high art and bling, between adornment and the grotesque, and memorializes those rendered “un-visible.” She also revisits her early days at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Jamaica, her moving back and forth to the United States, and her ongoing negotiation with labels of Blackness and “Jamaican-ness,” as she follows her own guiding voices and embraces discomfort, grief, and the Trojan-horse possibilities of her work.