migra and coloniality
Françoise Vergès
In this podcast, Françoise Vergès unpacks the social and environmental politics of cleaning and waste, charting and questioning temporal and spatial interactions that create a neutral site of deprivation, exhaustion and exploitation. She sheds light on the economy and politics of exhaustion, pointing out the role of racial capitalism in the climate crisis. Vergès suggests a political re-reading and understanding of vital needs and natural elements through notions of cleaning, hygiene and medicine, and raises revolutionary questions about the prefabricated assumptions of justice and social transformation through re-thinking the museum.
Lydia Ourahmane
Lydia Ourahmane is an Algerian-born multidisciplinary artist who has spent much of her life in the UK. In her installations and interventions, the notions of object and subject—considered separate in Western thought—converge and dialogue between the public and private, the alien and borrowed, migration and extractivism, everyday life and the affective materiality of things. In this podcast we talk (in total darkness) to Lydia about her relationship with echo as a phenomenon for the creation of negative space, about listening as a trigger for singular experience. We also talk about her connection to spirituality through her family experience, a community persecuted for its faith in her home country. Finally, we hear some open questions about the idea of home, belonging and freedom, and about the miraculous, the unexplained and the absolute.
Bouchra Khalili
Through a practice that combines documentary, conceptual art, installation, and oral storytelling, Bouchra Khalili explores questions of self-representation, political agency, and the resistance strategies of individuals and communities rendered invisible by the colonial, oppressive, and exclusionary dynamics of nation-states. Who is a witness? Who tells the story? Who documents, archives, and transmits the accounts that reach us? These are the central questions that run through all of Khalili’s work. In this podcast, we talk to Bouchra Khalili about what it means to produce images and to approach film and documentary practice from new places and perspectives.
Núria Güell
Núria Güell’s artistic practice always starts with a contradiction or social conflict that she feels directly challenged or affected by. These give rise to long collaborative processes in which listening, legal research, negotiation, and confrontation—as well as affinities and affects—become essential creative tools. Her practice is part of her life, and it often involves taking legal, physical, and emotional risks. In FONS AUDIO #55, Núria Güell talks to us about the processes, conversations, research, and formalisation behind the making of Ayuda humanitaria (Humanitarian aid) (2008-2013), a piece she began during the years she spent in in Cuba, which became part of the MACBA Collection in 2021.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Argentinian writer and researcher Flavia Dzodan.