Climate change
Maria Ptqk
We talk to the researcher and curator Maria Ptqk about the possible methodological alliances between art and science. We check out her recent years of research, which have crystalised in the exhibition Science Friction. Life among companion species and in other embodiments and projects. We look at the narrative dimension of scientific knowledge, via Donna Haraway, and at the symbiotic relationships between interdependent organisms through the work of Lynn Margulis. We rethink the complex boundaries between the cultural and natural spheres, and we also embrace the monstrous, in order to call for a multispecies paradigm that overturns human supremacy.
Jaime Vindel
We talk to researcher, teacher, and essayist Jaime Vindel about art, entropy and economics. We go into museums and petrol stations to understand their materiality. We talk about the universal exhibitions of the 19th century and how the removal of objects from their places of origin is directly linked to the process of environmental degradation. We look at their steel and glass pavilions, and find the concrete. We also discuss coal and oil, the concept of productivity, and the dark underbelly of certain visual imaginaries
Andrea Ballestero
Whether in her teaching or her participation in the popular resistance for universal access to water, Andrea Ballestero’s approach is a feedback exercise that completely blurs the division between theory and practice. Her work advocates a collaborative, feminist modus operandi on ethnography, as well as the affordances of the environment: be that an ecosystem, a regulatory agency, or 'the technolegal devices at the centre of these political mobilisations'. We talk to Andrea Ballestero about aquifers and amorphous futures, about imagination as an essential part of the academic research process, and about the potential of bureaucratic practices as cogs in a possible machinery of change—which does not necessarily have to involve large-scale global transformations.
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.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with artist, researcher and theorist Elaine Gan that we were unable to include the first time around.