activism
Núria Güell
In Núria Güell’s (Vidreres, 1981) practice, the museum-institution becomes the actual medium of her art: she manipulates, squeezes and expands it, questions its rationale, blind spots and contradictions, and seeks to transcend its boundaries. Her works always spring from social conflicts that directly affect her, and she uses the strategies of art as platforms to dismantle the logic of power. In this podcast we talk to Núria Güell about her working methods and about the activation of artistic practices that become mechanisms for listening. We reflect on the realm of ethics and morality in art, and on disobediences, psychoanalysis, precarities, the status of the artist and the urgent need to recover the subversive potential of contemporary art.
Yasmine Boudiaf
Researcher and creative technologist Yasmine Boudiaf describes her art practice as “tin foil hat research”. She creates playful projects rooted in deep research methodologies ranging from writing to computing, in order to shed some light on the shape-shifting White Devil tactics behind ruling powers and new technologies. In this podcast, Yasmine Boudiaf walks us through some of her experiences in the corporate world and the performative aspects of negotiating the deeply entrenched British class system. She talks about AI ethics and the theater behind policy-making as well as soft power and Newspeak.
Suely Rolnik
In this podcast we talk to psychoanalyst, writer and academic Suely Rolnik about micropolitics and macropolitics, about the common and the subjective. We talk about air and about the present, and about how difficult it has become to inspire and to conspire. We abandon the idea of the apocalypse but also that of paradise. We turn our attention to spiders, pausing to observe their strong and flexible threads, and we consider creating provisional spiderwebs to allow the emergence of other worlds. For this weaving, Suely borrows and tells us about Guarani terms such as ñe'é, which means word and also soul.
Charmaine Chua
In this podcast, Singaporean organizer, writer, and scholar Charmaine Chua shares her research on the containerization of global logistics from the vantage of the Global South. Her journey begins aboard a container ship, embodying ethnographic observation and field work, as well as a radical rereading of the naval archive records of the colonial project. The mix of methodologies, experiences and data highlights the incongruities and the environmental, legal, and labour abuses that appear in the capitalist wet dream of efficiency in global trade.
Samaneh Moafi
Samaneh Moafi is an architect and the senior researcher at Forensic Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. She oversees the Centre For Contemporary Nature, a division within Forensic Architecture which explores the relationship between human rights violations, environmental violence, and anthropogenic climate change. In this podcast, Samaneh Moafi turns our gaze to notions of ecocide, negative commons and environmental violence in pursuit of accountability and change. In doing so, she takes us through the Negev desert, extraterritorial toxic clouds, orangutan nests in Indonesia, forest fires and weaponised wind gusts in the Gaza strip.