Specials

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.

Ingrid Guardiola is an essayist, filmmaker and arts manager whose career has been marked by the unwavering desire to question the structures that condition the way we see, feel and live: from visual culture to the production dynamics of arts institutions, by way of the changing ways in which we live and work. Her latest essay, La servidumbre de los protocolos (The Servitude of Protocols), looks at the underlying paradigms that shape contemporary life, unpacking the devices that govern our gestures, our time, and our interactions, under the banner of efficiency, surveillance and saturation. In this podcast, we talk to Ingrid about mutualism, symbols, and rituals, about the limits of cultural institutionalism, and about the cracks that make room for resistance. And we consider the possibility of thinking and feeling outside the boundaries imposed by the techno-bureaucratic apparatus.

In this podcast, we talk to sociologist Fernando Domínguez Rubio about the ecologies of care that fuel the fiction of artistic stability —a network of infrastructures, climate technologies, conservation laboratories and underground storage facilities, as well as the largely invisible workers whose labour is usually left out of the traditional narrative of art, even though it is pivotal. We talk about the constant struggle against entropy, reflecting on the physical and human resources devoted to it, but also on the ethical, political, and economic implications of trying to slow down the passage of time. Because the way Domínguez Rubio sees it, the museum is much more than a space for contemplation and a collective archive: it is a political and cultural technology aimed at freezing time, ordering the world, and determining what is worthy of conservation. We talk to Fernando Domínguez Rubio about regimes of objecthood, about storage facilities, memory, and greenhouses, about uniqueness, and about other ways of holding onto things.