Son[i]a
Lucía Egaña is an artist, writer, teacher, and anti-racist transfeminist activist. Lucía is a misfit researcher who for years has been implementing protocols designed to self-institute practices and spaces underpinned by a collective approach. Her methodology is undisciplined (or, as she says, subnormal), championing the bizarre, dirty, and marginal as a fertile testing ground for various relational, educational, and/or artistic devices. In this podcast we talk to Lucía Egaña about pedagogical processes, bibliographic dissent, wild writing, and the generative and affirmative potential of rage. We discuss identity politics, single-sex spaces, friendship as an engine for research, and the power of processes organised around informality and affects.
Cabello/Carceller is the artist duo Helena Cabello and Ana Carceller. Since the early nineties, they have been questioning the arbitrariness and restrictions imposed by gender divisions on our bodies, spaces, representations and behaviour. In this podcast Cabello/Carceller infiltrate the arts institution and show how queer voices are systematically excluded from spaces of power, as well as museums and collections. Through their work, they invite us to reconsider the spaces we live in and leave, in order to queer them and turn them into transitional, unproductive places – sometimes melancholy, sometimes liberating – from which to imagine and activate new kinds of existence. Together, we activate the political potentiality of bodies, affects, festivity and collectivity. But we also acknowledge the solitary revolt of discordant bodies who, by their mere presence, are already doing politics
A key figure in the field of live arts, Juan Domínguez describes himself as “a conceptual clown, magical cowboy, model-poet, and curator of pleasure.” His artistic body of work is situated both in and out of choreography, and champions excess as well as measure. In any case, he never loses sight of the question that guides his practice: “What shall we do together in this present moment to construct reality?”
We talk at length with Juan Domínguez about changing the parameters of live arts, putting a frame on reality, the complexities of participation and co-authorship, and Juan’s efforts to tense time and grow older with his projects and audiences. We also talk about his (admiring) envy of TV series, about robberies, about necessary and supporting co-conspirators, about the body and politics, and about discipline and chaos.
A grain of rice sits in a field on the banks of the Mekong river. A water buffalo breaks up soil in the Ifugao terraces in the Philippines. A black box containing rice seeds is placed on a shelf inside the Svalbard seed vault at -18°C in Norway. From such a common seed, hidden in plain sight, artist-scholar Elaine Gan weaves a dynamic network of relationships connecting agroecology and more-than-human sociability, subsistence farmers and climate change, contaminated taxonomies and feminist theory.In this podcast, Elaine Gan talks about crop science, feral technologies, the global pandemic, radical difference, the art of noticing, Matsutake mushrooms, and, of course, the blahblahsphere.
Hugo Esquinca’s work is a multi-layered crust, intentionally obfuscated through excess, deliberately hard to peel. Scraping off layers of obfuscation in this dense network of transductive interactions gets you nowhere, cause those layers are precisely what Hugo uses in order to expose you (and himself) to a sort of sensory overload. We discuss with Hugo how growing up in the hyperchaos of Mexico City relates to his fascination with speed, overabundance and syncretism.