Son[i]a
Raqs Media Collective founder Monica Narula talks about raga, the technological body, public domain, the ineffability of time, the Mahabharata, politics of language, exhaustion, dilation and the legibility.
Élisabeth Lebovici reflects on the AIDS crisis during the eighties, and on the crucial role of conceptual art and activism in shaping the new visual and affective paradigms which gave voice to communities that the capitalist, liquefied society was (and still is) striving to smother. We also talk about poetry, pornography, and all that art that museums balk at hanging on their walls.
Jean-Luc Nancy talks about the body as an echo chamber and as a sensible and sentient presence, about silence as the “infinite extremity of sound”, and the role of sound and listening in the context of political practice.
Marina Gržinić talks about amnesia, aphasia, and seizure, about biopower and necropolitics, about borders and volumes, corpus and corpses, about deathscapes, intestines, and holograms, and about the disturbing miniaturisation of affect and empathy, as a process that runs parallel to technological acceleration.
The philosopher, art historian, curator and critic José Luis Barrios Lara reflects on the founding myth of the West, modernity, and the invention of the other. He considers identity politics as a political tool and a means for the management of bodies in space, questions the effectiveness of the epistemologies of the South, and interprets the global migration crisis as a form of neo-slavery. A grim scenario in which, he says, certain intersections of art and politics still have the power to destabilise the semantic field of representation and make room for the subversive.