Son[i]a
Françoise Vergès
In this podcast, Françoise Vergès unpacks the social and environmental politics of cleaning and waste, charting and questioning temporal and spatial interactions that create a neutral site of deprivation, exhaustion and exploitation. She sheds light on the economy and politics of exhaustion, pointing out the role of racial capitalism in the climate crisis. Vergès suggests a political re-reading and understanding of vital needs and natural elements through notions of cleaning, hygiene and medicine, and raises revolutionary questions about the prefabricated assumptions of justice and social transformation through re-thinking the museum.
Macarena García
In this podcast, we talk to Chilean writer, editor and academic Macarena García about her working methods with children in schools and other shared educational spaces. We talk about challenging picture-books, about fascination and overflow as tools for collective transformation, and about what happens to bodies when they are together. We also explore the workings of censorship and how children’s literature approaches subjects such as death, sex, racism, dictatorship, feminism, gender identity and the climate crisis.
Haig Aivazian
Through media such as lectures, performance, video, drawing, installation, and sculpture, Haig Aivazian’s multifaceted works intricately blend the personal and the geopolitical as well as micro and macro narratives. They uncover or perhaps even fabricate complex threads, timelines and visual networks with multiple layers of meaning and ambiguity. His stories are intended to puzzle, reveal intangible connections, and evoke a sense of ghostly friction among conflicting ideas. In this podcast, we talk to Haig Aivazian about counter-propaganda, sports, blackouts, Palestine, fugitivity and what he calls “the dumping grounds of democracy”.
Lydia Ourahmane
Lydia Ourahmane is an Algerian-born multidisciplinary artist who has spent much of her life in the UK. In her installations and interventions, the notions of object and subject—considered separate in Western thought—converge and dialogue between the public and private, the alien and borrowed, migration and extractivism, everyday life and the affective materiality of things. In this podcast we talk (in total darkness) to Lydia about her relationship with echo as a phenomenon for the creation of negative space, about listening as a trigger for singular experience. We also talk about her connection to spirituality through her family experience, a community persecuted for its faith in her home country. Finally, we hear some open questions about the idea of home, belonging and freedom, and about the miraculous, the unexplained and the absolute.
Gabriel Chaile
In this podcast, we talk to Gabriel Chaile about slowness as a space of resistance, about the austere and changing bodies of his functional sculptures, and about poverty, memory and oblivion. Following the rhythm of his own life, we travel from the shores of Tucumán to the centre of the contemporary art world and the international scene. And along the way, we discover and lay the first stones of his Centro Cultural Ambulante [Travelling Cultural Centre], which is not really a space but a beacon calling for an attitude to life and connection with others.