Son[i]a
Alma Söderberg is a choreographer and performer who works with music and dance. As well as exploring close listening, Alma listens to rhythm and movement, in order to inhabit polyrythm and "simultaneous difference", to quote Eric Davis by way of Alma. In this podcast, Alma tells us about the many musical influences that inspire her choreographic practice: jazz, flamenco, hip hop, and experimental and Afro-American music. She also talks about multiplicity, reduced listening and deep listening, about letting rhythm run through you, about the voice, sharing, idiorhythms, Anni Albers, weaving, learning to wait, and about playing.
To the Argentinian trumpeter, percussionist, songwriter, and producer Tatiana Heuman, the world is a dance floor and and sound comes into being through close bodily combat involving intuition, movement, and hurdles. Thus, a paradox arises in the recording process, when spontaneity and corporality are reduced to mere beats on a timeline. In this podcast, Tatiana Heuman talks about music that runs through the body, about the intersections between dance and percussion, about sounds that move, about deconstructed folklore and babbling, about formal and informal teaching, about addition and subtraction, about names that don’t mean anything, and about the experiences of women who play and lug around drum kits.
Finnish artist Terike Haapoja invites us to imagine this posthumanism: a hybrid, expansive, empathetic “we” with room for ambiguity and difference and for interspecies political understanding, in which the morbid fantasy of human exceptionalism and the hierarchy of species is put to rest once and for all. Drawing on concepts such as Syl Ko’s black veganism, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s expanded theory of animal rights, and Carol J. Adams’ sexual politics of meat, Terike Haapoja ventures to imagine a world beyond animalisation and distinctions between protected and disposable beings.
New York artist Susan Bee defends the political and subversive potential that develops when art and pleasure unite. Which is why imagination, poetry, humour, subjectivity, textures, colours, lines, and matter play an essential role in her work, both in her collages and paintings and her artist’s books. As an art student in the late sixties, she first came in contact with feminist activism and other social movements such as black power, gay rights, and protests against the Vietnam War. In 1986, she embarked on the project M/E/A/N/I/N/G, a self-managed art magazine that she co-edited with fellow artist Mira Schor for thirty years. In this podcast, Susan also shares the particularities of being a woman and an artist who has passed the age threshold of 65 in New York’s artistic ecosystem today.
Fefa Vila Nuñez is a queer feminist ‘artivist’, sociologist, mother, essayist, teacher, and many other things. Fefa was one of the founders of the lesbian collective LSD (1993-1998), which was, together with La Radical Gai, one of the touchstones of queer artivism in Spain in the 1990s. Through their political-artistic actions, LSD and La Radi defended new ways of understanding the body, sex, life, death, desire, friendship, family and work relationships, and political action. In this podcast, Fefa Vila reflects aloud on queerness as a state of radical estrangement, which is constantly being redefined. She also talks about the need to experience other forms of sociability, about other affective-relational models and about motherhood.