activism

In this podcast, we talk to the artist, editor, translator and activist Marcelo Expósito about scales and oratories, about artistic methodologies, political imagination and herbariums. We look at constitutional leaps that broaden opportunities for listening and remind us—from the South—of the rights of the earth, rivers and mountains. Marcelo also tells us about how recombining existing laws and treaties can be a way of updating valuable constructive procedures and reinvigorating non-fascist ways of life, in this new context of historical breakdown. 

Purita Pelayo is a writer, photographer and human rights activist, and a key voice in the fight for LGBITQ+ rights in the Republic of Ecuador. Her unusual sensitivity from a very young age soon blossomed into a pressing need to improve living conditions for the trans community in her country. In this podcast, we join Purita in exploring her vitality and life force, and the life that she has lived unapologetically. A sensitive woman for whom activism became one of many ways of inhabiting the world, Purita is now mainly working from the trenches of culture to preserve Ecuador’s trans memory and make it sustainable, based on a huge archive of photographs that she has taken and kept for decades. She is now focusing her energies on finding institutions willing to house her archive and disseminate its narrative through writing and outreach. 

In this conversation, we talk with Maya-Kaqchikel artist and activist Marilyn Boror Bor about languages, textiles, relationality, extractivism, and cement. She tells us about the slow violence of processes of assimilation, about the importance of the Mayan language and culture, and of how colonisation has demonised ancestral knowledge. She recounts what it means to live in a land perforated by a cement factory, where water scarcity becomes the norm and mountains are drilled until they lose their spirit. Hence the urgency of the connection to the land and indigenous struggles, which are not new, but have always existed: a millennial memory that still breathes.

Born in apartheid-era Johannesburg to a Jewish family, descended from Holocaust survivors, Adam Broomberg's trajectory spans teenage anti-apartheid activism, years embedded in global conflict zones, and commercial collaborations that later became subjects of critique. Across this arc, his work has evolved into a sustained inquiry into power: his own positionality, the complicities of photography, and its potential to be repurposed as a tool for change. In this conversation, the artist and educator traces his own path through images, complicities, and refusals. He reflects on the toxicity of photography, how he engaged with its reproduction and refusal – through projects with large-format cameras, archival excavations, and counter-surveillance. We talk about the olive tree project, about authorship as collective practice, and about his conviction that the personal is always political. Now based in Berlin, carrying the memory of genocide, he offers a lucid reflection on what it means to inhabit Jewishness today — and why, in his view, the greatest threat to the Jewish community no longer comes from the past, but from something more insidious in the present.