Son[i]a
In this podcast, we talk to Cornelia Sollfrank about art, technology and gender, and about performance, bodies and networks. We go back to the very early days with collective projects such as Frauen und Technik and OBN—groundbreaking experiences in which the screen opened up to make way for this other enormous, virtual space to be inhabited. A wealth of practices, projects and experiences—which she now refers to as techno-feminism—in a career that has led her to explore the commons, organizational aesthetics, and the role of the law and of copyright in defining (or not defining) where an original work of art begins and ends in the digital realm.
In this podcast we talk to environmental historian, researcher and writer Troy Vettese about veganism, ecology and geoengineering and about neoliberalism and the environmental crisis. We look at past examples of vegan socialist experiences and understand the urgency of including animal rights in radical thought. We also examine the tension between nature and the market, accepting the impossibility of dealing with the climate crisis through eco-modernist techno-solutions.
The work of artist Itxaso Corral calls on an extensive glossary of concepts, media, and practices that explore beyond the bounds of closed definitions, in a gesture that simultaneously expands the scope of possibility of so-called live arts. In this podcast, Itxaso Corral shares with us the small rituals that give shape and meaning to her artistic activities: pulsations of life that emerge through performance, dance, singing, and calligraphy as experiential spaces, which are the result of lived experience and long durations, and of the energy that arises from learning and doing with others.
It’s tempting to describe Marissa Malik’s practice as a crossroads—one where music production intersects with mysticism, DJing and astrology. But the way she talks about these complementary aspects instead suggests that they are all on a sort of Möbius strip, a continuum with no beginning or end, on which they harmonically coexist and feed back on each other. This paradoxical geometry relies on a worldview and a critical gaze that has allowed Marissa to explore and put her own spin on the correlation between language, racial segregation and gender, especially in the framework of diaspora communities like her own. We sat down with Marissa Malik to talk about language, rituals, migration, mysticism, barriers, queerness and sexuality in her musical domain.
In Núria Güell’s (Vidreres, 1981) practice, the museum-institution becomes the actual medium of her art: she manipulates, squeezes and expands it, questions its rationale, blind spots and contradictions, and seeks to transcend its boundaries. Her works always spring from social conflicts that directly affect her, and she uses the strategies of art as platforms to dismantle the logic of power. In this podcast we talk to Núria Güell about her working methods and about the activation of artistic practices that become mechanisms for listening. We reflect on the realm of ethics and morality in art, and on disobediences, psychoanalysis, precarities, the status of the artist and the urgent need to recover the subversive potential of contemporary art.