institutional critique

In this podcast, we talk with indigenous Sámi researcher, writer, curator and artist Liisa-Rávná Finbog about napkins, museums, collections, and colonialism, to challenge hierarchies, cultural extractivism, and the hidden violence in any process of cultural assimilation. We also highlight the causal relationship between art and coloniality, questioning the separation between function and aesthetics. Duodji thus emerges as an ancestral practice and knowledge system — that dismantles and emancipates itself from the Western construct of craft, while invoking a dialogical relationship with materiality. We open a portal to understand and share the ways of thinking, being, and existing in interdependence, of the Sámi people.

In this podcast, cultural manger and mediator David Yubraham Sánchez expands on critical thoughts formulated in educational spaces, in constant conversation with others—an exercise in examining racist and colonial patterns in order to dismantle fictitious equivalences in the name of diversity. Thinking-by-doing—with collective work as his main methodology—gives rise to a profusion of tips, strategies and objectives to guide the work of anti-racist mediation, education, and cultural programming. This involves problematising the hollowing out of rights and cultural policies, identifying absences and erasures in democratic memory and national heritage, and implementing the political practice of listening.   

In FONS ÀUDIO #47, Andrea Fraser comments the work 'Little Frank and His Carp', in the MACBA Collection, which registered her performance in the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2001. Recorded by five hidden cameras, 'Little Frank and His Carp' follows the artist’s movements from different angles and shows the changes in attitude and emotion generated by the male voice of the audio guide.

Interview with Julia Robinson, curator of the "George Brecht: Events" exhibition.