Re-Imagine Europe

In this podcast, we talk with indigenous Sámi researcher, writer, curator and artist Liisa-Rávná Finbog about napkins, museums, collections, and colonialism, to challenge hierarchies, cultural extractivism, and the hidden violence in any process of cultural assimilation. We also highlight the causal relationship between art and coloniality, questioning the separation between function and aesthetics. Duodji thus emerges as an ancestral practice and knowledge system — that dismantles and emancipates itself from the Western construct of craft, while invoking a dialogical relationship with materiality. We open a portal to understand and share the ways of thinking, being, and existing in interdependence, of the Sámi people.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with researcher and transdisciplinary curator Yaiza Hernández. We unpack the relationship between militarism and tourism by looking at zonified border territories that also model touristification. Through this lens, we also see that the tourist resort replicates the architectural layout of the colony, offering safe spaces for privilege, wealth, and whiteness. Then, we take a look at the current form of the museum model, warning of certain symptoms suggesting it is reaching a terminal stage. We wrap up with a digression into Yaiza’s understanding of cultural appropriation.

OBJECTHOOD #9 keeps asking questions about the limits and borders of stuff all around us – from countries to nuclear sites. We talk to Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou about her work on exclusion zones and radioactive waste management, focusing on temporal and spatial thresholds. Our second guest, researcher and activist Nishat Awan, talks about unsettlement and geopolitical borders, especially in relation to Pakistan and her field work in Balochistan. Get ready for a deep dive into the oddness of boundaries, including political demarcations, the interplay between insects and radiation leaks, forced displacements, and gigantic triangles, to name but a few. Curated by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros

Murphy works with and against technoscience in the areas of environmental justice and data politics, colonialism, sexuality, reproduction and race. Their approach is interdisciplinary not only in the sense of involving various areas of knowledge, but also in enacting their dual responsibility: the almost impossible task of dismantling extractive racial capitalism, by means of re-imagining radical Black, queer, Indigenous and feminist decolonial horizons and worlds of care. In this podcast, Murphy walks us through permission-to-pollute infrastructures in and around Chemical Valley in the Great Lakes area, the largest basin of fresh surface water on the planet.