political imagination
Andrea Ballestero
Whether in her teaching or her participation in the popular resistance for universal access to water, Andrea Ballestero’s approach is a feedback exercise that completely blurs the division between theory and practice. Her work advocates a collaborative, feminist modus operandi on ethnography, as well as the affordances of the environment: be that an ecosystem, a regulatory agency, or 'the technolegal devices at the centre of these political mobilisations'. We talk to Andrea Ballestero about aquifers and amorphous futures, about imagination as an essential part of the academic research process, and about the potential of bureaucratic practices as cogs in a possible machinery of change—which does not necessarily have to involve large-scale global transformations.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with sociologist, editor and writer César Rendueles that we were unable to include the first time around.
César Rendueles
When we chat to César Rendueles, the pages of his new book “Contra la igualdad de oportunidades. Un panflento igualirtarista” (Seix Barral, 2020) still smell of fresh ink. We talk about the myth of universal connectivity and technological dystopia. We touch on necropolitics, necroeconomics, and the importance of social ties in processes of social change. We go into museums, libraries, and schools to address the problems of public projects and the potential of egalitarian socialization and political imagination. We broach life and the market, work and care, health and business, meritocracy and privileges... to shed light on our shared fragility and our collective obligation to think about economics in a different way, accepting that we will never start from scratch.
Mônica Hoff
Mônica Hoff talks about epistemological Dadaism and education in public, about institutions that learn, dissent as a strategy to generate movement and thought, scales, micropoltics, and the cracks in which everything happens, and about slowing down, or even stopping.
Emilio Santiago Muiño
Emilio Santiago Muiño talks about salad gardens in museums, social movements and public policies, about oil as a magical substance, ecofascism, acceleration, and degrowth, and about how an imaginary of more modest utopías may, in the long term, become a means of finding our way home.