Specials

In this podcast we talk to Nerea Calvillo about data, translations, and citizen science and about pollution, gases, and particles. We spend some time on sensors and infrastructures designed to be invisible, exploring what their data show, and also what they hide. And we think about air and its composition. Nerea also suggests a reading of pollen from a queer theory perspective, challenging its binary classification as either good for the environment or a health threat, and revealing its nature as a material agent that reconfigures the relationships between bodies, cities, and ecologies.

In FONS ÀUDIO #61, Mireia Sallarès talks to us about her works in the MACBA collection. We plunge right in with Literatura de Replà, una relectura [Literature on the landing, A Rereading] (2014), Mireia’s first work to enter the MACBA Collection—although it may one day leave it—before moving disjointedly to Història potencial de Francesc Tosquelles, Catalunya i la Por [Potential History of Francesc Tosquelles, Catalunya, and Fear] (2021), a public service for the people of Catalonia. As the conversation unfurls in the opposite order to how it took place, we finish with Las Muertas Chiquitas [Little Deaths] (2009-2016), which Sallarès tells us she can always revisit to find a quote.

Ren Loren Britton is an artist, researcher, activist, and practitioner whose work focuses on reimagining access, and anti-ableist cultural practices exploring non-normative time, linguistic nonlinear structures, at the intersections of arts, technology and pedagogy holding spaces for diverse temporalities. In this podcast, we delve into Radical access, Access riders, Access servers and the edges of access. We also think of access as feelings, access as a mood and a-temporal desire. We also talk about stretching time, the slipperiness of the lived experience, trans*disabled lineages, histories of other past(s), the burden of remembering, the weight of datasets and unforgetting as an act of caring.

In a country like Spain, where rural areas have historically been subject to dispossession and marginalisation, Jose’s work reveals the ravages of extractivism, from lithium mining to solar panel monocultures. He links these practices to historical processes of conquest, latifundism, and the privatisation of the countryside, while also exploring the ways in which communities resist and seek to build alternatives. In this podcast, Jose Iglesias García-Arenal invites us to imagine interstices of possibility where community resistance, historical memories, and art come together to redefine how we inhabit the world. We talk about invented traditions, olive trees, sheep, looms, and the complex interactions between past, present and future.