Son[i]a
Marilyn Boror Bor
In this conversation, we talk with Maya-Kaqchikel artist and activist Marilyn Boror Bor about languages, textiles, relationality, extractivism, and cement. She tells us about the slow violence of processes of assimilation, about the importance of the Mayan language and culture, and of how colonisation has demonised ancestral knowledge. She recounts what it means to live in a land perforated by a cement factory, where water scarcity becomes the norm and mountains are drilled until they lose their spirit. Hence the urgency of the connection to the land and indigenous struggles, which are not new, but have always existed: a millennial memory that still breathes.
Mikaelah Drullard
In this podcast, Mikaelah Drullard dismantles the clichés of Western progressivism and reminds us that the plantation has not gone away. With words that cut like machetes, she shows how human rights are still the key to a house that only white bodies can enter. Against the impunity of a livestreamed genocide, Mikaelah takes up a radical gesture of decolonisation: the rejection of humanity itself. She also criticises white feminism, whose promise of equality breaks down when skin is in the game, and she draws on insurgent genealogies that invent other ways of living. Her defiance also fuels the power of transvestite technologies: fingernails as political accessories, beauty as revenge. A celebration of that which has been denied.
Mobile Radio
Agitators by nature, Sarah Washington and Knut Aufermann's radio practice involves the activation of ephemeral radio stations that emerge from a mix of technical skills and knowledge, their desire to keep trying new things and testing the medium, and their capacity to bring out the best in the local communities that host them. In this podcast, they talk about their approach to radio through the various spaces they have activated over the years: from workshops to major projects such as the studio at the São Paolo Biennial, Radio Revolten: 30 Days of Radio Art in Halle, and the 100-day Radio Art Zone. They also talk about smaller projects, such as their improvisation duo, Tonic Train, which encapsulates their idea of artistic practice –and life– as something dirty and leaky, in the best sense of the words.
Purita Pelayo
Purita Pelayo is a writer, photographer and human rights activist, and a key voice in the fight for LGBITQ+ rights in the Republic of Ecuador. Her unusual sensitivity from a very young age soon blossomed into a pressing need to improve living conditions for the trans community in her country. In this podcast, we join Purita in exploring her vitality and life force, and the life that she has lived unapologetically. A sensitive woman for whom activism became one of many ways of inhabiting the world, Purita is now mainly working from the trenches of culture to preserve Ecuador’s trans memory and make it sustainable, based on a huge archive of photographs that she has taken and kept for decades. She is now focusing her energies on finding institutions willing to house her archive and disseminate its narrative through writing and outreach.
Kate Rich
In this podcast, we talk to artist and feral economist Kate Rich about administration, entrepreneurship and feral vocabularies. We consider the cycles of learning and unlearning required to open up the imaginary of cooperation and business, and access their enduring emotional content. We recap experiences of shared bank accounts, economic abstractions as temporary hiding places, greyness as camouflage or cover, and acknowledge administrative practice as the inevitable soundtrack of our lives that is waiting to be reimagined.