collective creation

For the Columbian collective Laagencia, mediation and education are indistinguishable from artistic practice. Laagencia first opened its doors in 2010 in the Chapinero district of Bogotá, as an office for art projects with an exhibition space, run by Mariana Murcia, Diego García, Santiago Pinyol, Mónica Zamudio and Sebastián Cruz. Five years later it was rebooted as a collective thinking and study group open to methodological experimentation and informality, always looking for ways to organise new forms of “doing with others”. In this ensemble podcast, we talk with them about these ten years of "extitution"

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with the collective Laagencia, embodied here by the voices of Mariana Murcia, Diego García and Santiago Pinyol, that we were unable to include the first time around. 

Based in Dakar, Senegal, Raw Material Company is an independent, collaborative centre that aims to foster critical thinking through artistic practice. In this conversation, Marie Hélène Pereira and Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy—two key members of Raw Material Company—discuss a situated feminist and decolonial practice that focuses on doing rather than enunciating and categorizing. They share some of their experiences and talk about the strategies they use to create rich forms of dialogue and to negotiate the tensions and the ideological and economic constraints imposed through the still-colonial structures of the so-called global North.

In this podcast we talk to the queer collective El Palomar about art, dissidence, and pedagogy. We dive deep into their strategies for self-care and resilience. We talk about the importance of producing disobedient, abject, situated genealogies, despite the obstacles to remembering the past in Spain. We share the experience and trauma of embodied research, and reread the pandemic experience through the lens of the lessons of the silenced AIDS crisis. Touch and queer parties emerge as political possibility and bastions of resistance where drives are liberated, limits are transgressed, and the hostilities of a hetero-centric world disappear, albeit temporarily.