Re-Imagine Europe
Based in Dakar, Senegal, Raw Material Company is an independent, collaborative centre that aims to foster critical thinking through artistic practice. In this conversation, Marie Hélène Pereira and Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy—two key members of Raw Material Company—discuss a situated feminist and decolonial practice that focuses on doing rather than enunciating and categorizing. They share some of their experiences and talk about the strategies they use to create rich forms of dialogue and to negotiate the tensions and the ideological and economic constraints imposed through the still-colonial structures of the so-called global North.
Pere Noguera is a conceptual artist. Since the early 1970s he has been experimenting with the aesthetic, poetic, and metaphysical possibilities of mud, water, landscape, paper, photocopies, photography, everyday objects, action, and the passage of time. In FONS AUDIO #51, he gives us some insight into works such as "La fotocòpia com a obra document" (1975), "Càntirs" (1976), "Pedra i ganxos de ferro. Sèrie 'Massanet'" (1977) and "Porta doble" (1990).
Samaneh Moafi is an architect and the senior researcher at Forensic Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. She oversees the Centre For Contemporary Nature, a division within Forensic Architecture which explores the relationship between human rights violations, environmental violence, and anthropogenic climate change. In this podcast, Samaneh Moafi turns our gaze to notions of ecocide, negative commons and environmental violence in pursuit of accountability and change. In doing so, she takes us through the Negev desert, extraterritorial toxic clouds, orangutan nests in Indonesia, forest fires and weaponised wind gusts in the Gaza strip.
DeForrest Brown’s work includes music released under the moniker Speaker Music, but largely revolves around research and writing. He looks back at the complex roots of black American culture and at phenomena like techno, in order to expose this systematic obliteration. And above all, to draw attention to the neglected creativity of its pioneers and the rich sonic universe they created from the rubble of a crumbling Detroit. Against the tide of the prevailing narrative, Brown’s work seeks to contextualize these episodes by highlighting key economic and political factors of the time, intertwined with personal anecdotes and a sincere love for the music. We talk to Deforrest Brown about Detroit veterans, broken futures, Reaganomics, screams, government sanctioned murder, and Disco Demolition in the post-truth era.
In our second conversation with founding director of Forensic Architecture Eyal Weizman, we explore further the nuances of their sophisticated research practice, this time focusing on the notions of time and duration from a forensic perspective in order to unfold multiple temporalities from an instant. In doing so, Weizman explains how to build a case for public truth using clouds, architecture, metadata, shadows, testimonies, and surveillance and satellite imagery.