Specials

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across sound, image, text, installation and performance, unfolding a practice that moves between documentation and performativity, between political reality and speculative imagination. Focusing on their works in the MACBA Collection, FONS AUDIO #65 turns to their reflection on Prisoners of Love (Until the Sun of Freedom) (2024–2025). Developed as a site-specific multimedia installation, the work emerges from their ongoing research into the resilience of former Palestinian political prisoners, where song and poetry persist as forms of transmission under conditions of confinement.

David Bestué’s practice sits at the intersection of sculpture, architecture, and language, although it also extends to other forms such as curating and essay writing. In A FONS ÀUDIO #64, we focus on his works in the MACBA Collection, taking us back to the beginnings of his career, to contextualize his collaboration with the artist and performer Marc Vives, under the alias Bestué/Vives—a key phase that precedes his later research into architecture, memory, and materiality. Over the course of a decade, the duo developed a body of work marked by constant experimentation, in which sculpture and performance merge with narrative fiction. After the dissolution of the shared project, Bestué directed his research toward the relationships between architecture, memory, and materiality, a line of inquiry materialized in works such as Uralitas, also documented here.

Cuban-American artist and writer Coco Fusco explores issues such as cultural, racial, and gender identity; the construction of alterity; the colonial legacy; and the mechanisms of control, censorship and repression that systems of power impose on people’s bodies and lives. In FONS ÀUDIO #63, Fusco discusses two of her works in the MACBA Collection: Els segadors (2001) and Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word (2021), where she reflects respectively on Catalan identity and mourning rituals in times of crisis, connecting the local with the universal.

In this conversation, we talk to Carlos Motta about the genealogy of Nefandus, about the concept of sodomy as a tool of colonial control, and about the links between sexuality, morality and power. Carlos also talks us through the collaborative and physical processes of Gravedad, his relationship with endurance performance, and how pain, gesture and care can become symbolic languages of resistance. During our talk, we also look back at works such as Naufragios (Shipwreck), The Defeated (2013), and Towards a Homoerotic Historiography (2014), and we discuss archival strategies, museographic devices, and the importance of rethinking history from the margins.