Son[i]a
Possible Bodies questions and problematises the formulation, conception, and rendering of bodies across different 3D technologies such as modelling, tracking and scanning. Their affirmative critical research draws attention to the ways in which these techniques end up implementing and even amplifying a host of prejudices based on race, gender, class, age and ability which, far from being circumstantial, are woven into the actual source code of all sorts of applications. We talk to Femke Snelting about embodiments, optimisation, and 3D disasters, about the possible and the probable, parametric interfaces, and open standards, and about disobedient action research.
Reassessing and defamiliarizing historical narratives that sit at the core of white patriarchal societies, is a necessary feminist practice and one at which Cara New Daggett, writer and researcher in the field of energy politics, excels at. In this podcast, energy, work, utopian demands, and unions, become intertwined with oil cultures, petromasculinities and ecomodernism, to reflect on growth, dependency, debt and energy transitions beyond extractivism. Degrowth, desire, pleasure, feminist science and new story-telling strategies are revealed as key ingredients for the recipe to reimagine ecologically generous ways of life on Earth.
In this podcast we talk to the queer collective El Palomar about art, dissidence, and pedagogy. We dive deep into their strategies for self-care and resilience. We talk about the importance of producing disobedient, abject, situated genealogies, despite the obstacles to remembering the past in Spain. We share the experience and trauma of embodied research, and reread the pandemic experience through the lens of the lessons of the silenced AIDS crisis. Touch and queer parties emerge as political possibility and bastions of resistance where drives are liberated, limits are transgressed, and the hostilities of a hetero-centric world disappear, albeit temporarily.
We talk to the researcher and curator Maria Ptqk about the possible methodological alliances between art and science. We check out her recent years of research, which have crystalised in the exhibition Science Friction. Life among companion species and in other embodiments and projects. We look at the narrative dimension of scientific knowledge, via Donna Haraway, and at the symbiotic relationships between interdependent organisms through the work of Lynn Margulis. We rethink the complex boundaries between the cultural and natural spheres, and we also embrace the monstrous, in order to call for a multispecies paradigm that overturns human supremacy.
We talk to researcher, teacher, and essayist Jaime Vindel about art, entropy and economics. We go into museums and petrol stations to understand their materiality. We talk about the universal exhibitions of the 19th century and how the removal of objects from their places of origin is directly linked to the process of environmental degradation. We look at their steel and glass pavilions, and find the concrete. We also discuss coal and oil, the concept of productivity, and the dark underbelly of certain visual imaginaries