orality

Carlos Motta sees his research as a potential space of enunciation from which to act as a counterweight to the prevailing narratives—a positive gesture of recognition of social groups, identities and communities whose voices have been suppressed by the dominant colonial power. His radical multidisciplinary practice and his use of a range of media—from video to installation, sculpture, performance and drawing on paper—make him hard to pin down. He also focuses on interaction with others, in ensemble works involving orality, documentary, curating, and even organizing public programs and symposia. In this podcast, we talk to Carlos Motta about art, politics, the market, and working conditions.

In this podcast, Mikaelah Drullard dismantles the clichés of Western progressivism and reminds us that the plantation has not gone away. With words that cut like machetes, she shows how human rights are still the key to a house that only white bodies can enter. Against the impunity of a livestreamed genocide, Mikaelah takes up a radical gesture of decolonisation: the rejection of humanity itself. She also criticises white feminism, whose promise of equality breaks down when skin is in the game, and she draws on insurgent genealogies that invent other ways of living. Her defiance also fuels the power of transvestite technologies: fingernails as political accessories, beauty as revenge. A celebration of that which has been denied. 

In this podcast, political theorist Adom Getachew walks us through the histories of Garveyism, the dynamism of music and political speech, an inward-facing politics of self-transformation, and what decoloniality might mean beyond the mere insertion or inclusion of voices into structures that ultimately re-center existing forms of power. From Garveyite schools of “educating allocution” to the broadcast traditions of anticolonial movements, she explores how power travels not only through institutions and treaties, but through sound—through the ways communities cultivate a collective voice when paper is too costly, borders too rigid, and histories too fractured. Her reflections remind us that political transformation is always collaborative, always practiced in relation, and shaped by those who find ways to speak even when they are not handed a stage.