more-than-human

In this podcast, Seba Calfuqueo dismantles heroes, monuments and categories, while reclaiming gaps, taboos and the elements as spaces of complexity from which to strike up conversation. They also talk about owning where you come from and the position from which you speak. And they argue for the collective occupation of spaces that have historically been denied to the Mapuche people. For Seba, being Mapuche means having a connection with the land, and in this conversation they present a way of understanding of life in which queerness is the very essence of nature.

Writer and independent researcher Laura Tripaldi started her career in materials science and nanotechnology. But instead of approaching chemistry through the lens of the microscope, she decided to zoom out to a speculative point of view at the intersection of science, technology, art, and philosophy. In her work, Tripaldi uses the nano scale to challenge preconceived ideas about identity, artificiality, neutrality and reality itself, exploring how technologies construct and transform our bodies, minds, and societies. We talk to Laura Tripaldi about surfaces, interfaces, the intelligence of materials, spider silk, softness, colloids, rocks and technologies of gender.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with artist, researcher and theorist Elaine Gan that we were unable to include the first time around.

A grain of rice sits in a field on the banks of the Mekong river. A water buffalo breaks up soil in the Ifugao terraces in the Philippines. A black box containing rice seeds is placed on a shelf inside the Svalbard seed vault at -18°C in Norway. From such a common seed, hidden in plain sight, artist-scholar Elaine Gan weaves a dynamic network of relationships connecting agroecology and more-than-human sociability, subsistence farmers and climate change, contaminated taxonomies and feminist theory.In this podcast, Elaine Gan talks about crop science, feral technologies, the global pandemic, radical difference, the art of noticing, Matsutake mushrooms, and, of course, the blahblahsphere.