Re-Imagine Europe

Ren Loren Britton is an artist, researcher, activist, and practitioner whose work focuses on reimagining access, and anti-ableist cultural practices exploring non-normative time, linguistic nonlinear structures, at the intersections of arts, technology and pedagogy holding spaces for diverse temporalities. In this podcast, we delve into Radical access, Access riders, Access servers and the edges of access. We also think of access as feelings, access as a mood and a-temporal desire. We also talk about stretching time, the slipperiness of the lived experience, trans*disabled lineages, histories of other past(s), the burden of remembering, the weight of datasets and unforgetting as an act of caring.

In this podcast, we talk to the artist, editor, translator and activist Marcelo Expósito about scales and oratories, about artistic methodologies, political imagination and herbariums. We look at constitutional leaps that broaden opportunities for listening and remind us—from the South—of the rights of the earth, rivers and mountains. Marcelo also tells us about how recombining existing laws and treaties can be a way of updating valuable constructive procedures and reinvigorating non-fascist ways of life, in this new context of historical breakdown. 

In this podcast, singer and composer Maya Al-Khaldi and Qanun player, DJ and producer Sarouna talk about the Palestinian music scenes and about their own musical approaches and artistic practices. They question the electronic music genre from a decolonial point of view and talk about the issues around fusion and the exoticization of cultural expression. Folklore emerges as a complex and often disputed concept. The conversation touches on the tensions between the archive and lived experience, the challenges of non-existent or inaccessible archives, and the importance of preserving cultural heritage. They also reflect on the crucial need for collective mourning as Palestinians and talk about the weight of imposed guilt, and about resilience. Sarouna’s thoughtfully captured field recordings of everyday moments in Palestine are woven through the podcast.

In this podcast, Imani Jacqueline Brown tells us about her formative experience as an activist in New Orleans and in the crucible of Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street movement. We also talk about eugenics and about how Carl Linnaeus’s philosophy during the Enlightement divided existence into parcels of private property, about oil infrastructure networks and environmental racism in Death Alley, and about apocalypse as repeated events. Along the way, Imani imagines paths to ecological reparation, ways to steward and attend to the world. She finds that it is precisely the uncultivated land at the back of the plantation that is rich with life and possibility: the seed banks of new growth.