FONS ÀUDIO

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.

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.

In FONS ÀUDIO #60, artist Hac Vinent takes us deep into her work "Hard Persistence". Her artistic practice resonates with a crip-queer and/or anti-ableist perspective: in short, a politics of life that advocates for those marginalised by a system that standardises and validates the body for the benefit of capitalism. In "Hard Persistence", subtitles, closed captions, displacements, hapticity and the cyborg body—via prostheses—come together in a fragmentary narrative that questions the essentialist idea of a fixed identity. The starting point is the premise that, in an ableist context such as ours, a body assigned as disabled is not read as a complete human body.