Creative Commons
Jara Rocha
Researcher and activist Jara Rocha’s practice is concerned with mediating and mobilising the conditions of meaning production and materials for possibility. Fond of complexity and grounded in a trans*feminist sensibility, they explore the inequalities and stark contrasts in the distribution of the technological. They draw attention to the politics and aesthetics embedded in infrastructures and to how power organises itself, becoming simultaneously visible and inaccessible. A pure exercise in political imagination and situated dissidence that takes us from reproductive technologies to critical pedagogies in formal, non-formal, and informal structures, by way of technocolonialism and turbocapitalism. Without ever taking our eye off the global perspective and our immediate environment: from global care chains to the precarisation, invisibilisation, and offshoring of labour.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with architect and the senior researcher at Forensic Architecture, Samaneh Moafi. We talk about strategies for establishing cases of ecocide, about the complexity of analysing satellite images, about carbon monoxide mapping, and about working in networks.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with writer and researcher Cara New Daggett. We talk about the Mayapple Energy Transition Collective, feminist citation practices, collective writing and the difficulties academia still has with such exercises. We share the traumatic experience of being trolled after writing her essay "Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire". Coping with the pandemic and parenting with the climate crisis on the horizon are also brought to the table.
Cecilia Bengolea
Multidisciplinary artist Cecilia Bengolea sees dance as a tool and a medium for empathy and emotional exchange. She is particularly interested in anthropological research on contemporary and archaic forms of dance, and devotes herself to learning techniques, movements, and choreographies from around the world, using them to shape her own artistic vocabulary: an embodied movement and dance archive—built up individually and collectively—, in which the body becomes an animated sculpture for performance, video, and installations. In this podcast, Cecilia Bengolea talks about her life journey, a state between constant flux and sensual impulse that draws on Thai boxing and pole dancing as well as contemporary dance and dancehall.
Femke Snelting
Possible Bodies questions and problematises the formulation, conception, and rendering of bodies across different 3D technologies such as modelling, tracking and scanning. Their affirmative critical research draws attention to the ways in which these techniques end up implementing and even amplifying a host of prejudices based on race, gender, class, age and ability which, far from being circumstantial, are woven into the actual source code of all sorts of applications. We talk to Femke Snelting about embodiments, optimisation, and 3D disasters, about the possible and the probable, parametric interfaces, and open standards, and about disobedient action research.