collective creation
Polyphonic memories for a shared present #2
In the second episode of this series we pick up where we left off in our conversation with Lluïsa Roca, Luisa Ortínez, Xefo Guasch and Carles Ameller. With them, we explore Vídeo-Nou’s working methodologies, which were developed on the go, in the field, by doing things: because video was a new medium at the time, and because, together, they were inventing a system of transversal collaboration through which to capture the views and demands of a society eager to express itself after forty years of dictatorship, censorship and repression. Vídeo-Nou saw video as a mechanism for social engagement and intervention, making space for listening, conversation and debate as creative tools. Through video, the group became actively involved in neighbourhoods, community centres and associations, trade unions, and cultural spaces, opening up platforms for dialogue.
pantea
In this podcast, we talk to Iranian artist pantea about studying in Edinburgh, about the peat bogs of Scotland and about the misconceptions surrounding wetlands. We discuss agency, more-than-human subjectivities and the (im)possibilities that open up when thinking-with sundew, and talk about her experience with the Khamoosh listening and archiving community.
Polyphonic memories for a shared present #1
In this first episode, we revisit the early days of Video-Nou and its connection with other artists who were also starting to work with video in Catalonia. Hand in hand with Lluïsa Roca, Luisa Ortínez, Xefo Guasch and Carles Ameller, we look at the collective’s relationship with the counterculture, the underground, and libertarian movements. And we consider the particularities of video as a tool for documentary, communication, creation, and protest, with special attention to its uses within the political and social context of the period of the Spanish transition. We explore strategies such as feedback and counterinformation, and we get a behind-the-scenes insight into the making of Video-Nou’s first projects: Gràcia. Espais Verds (February-March 1977) and Campanya política per a la Lliga de Catalunya (April-May 1977), better known as the Video-Bus.
Kathrin Böhm
In this podcast, we open up a glossary of concepts that affect and leave their mark on Kathrin Böhm's many constellations and collective projects. From the notion of compost—which triggered a radical shift in her way of working and interacting with her material archive in recent years—to a reassessment of the very idea of economy, which, as Katherine Gibson writes, helps us discern spaces of value production that are not immediately apparent. We talk about how these other strategies and ways of doing things lead us to qualify and problematise alternative ways of understanding social and/or participatory practices, and even to read the idea of community critically.
Cornelia Sollfrank
In this podcast, we talk to Cornelia Sollfrank about art, technology and gender, and about performance, bodies and networks. We go back to the very early days with collective projects such as Frauen und Technik and OBN—groundbreaking experiences in which the screen opened up to make way for this other enormous, virtual space to be inhabited. A wealth of practices, projects and experiences—which she now refers to as techno-feminism—in a career that has led her to explore the commons, organizational aesthetics, and the role of the law and of copyright in defining (or not defining) where an original work of art begins and ends in the digital realm.