sexual dissidence
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.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with researcher, artist and cultural worker Daniel Gasol. We talk about the instrumentalisation of difference, the melancholy of normality, research practice, legitimised and non-legitimised knowledge… and a bunch of mid-to-long term plans.
In FONS AUDIO #53 El Palomar tell us about their work in the MACBA collection Not Only Homophiles Are Homosexual, but Also Those Blinded by the Lost Phallus, a project in which they take up an unfinished, unproduced script by essayist and anthropologist Alberto Cardín and decide to make the film by their own means. In the course of rereading (and rewriting) Cardín’s cinematic vision, and through a process of immersion and meticulous research into its immediate context and background, El Palomar reconstruct a chapter in our history of sexual dissent, which is today still full of gaps and absences. Chief among them, Alberto Cardín.
Researcher and activist Jara Rocha’s practice is concerned with mediating and mobilising the conditions of meaning production and materials for possibility. Fond of complexity and grounded in a trans*feminist sensibility, they explore the inequalities and stark contrasts in the distribution of the technological. They draw attention to the politics and aesthetics embedded in infrastructures and to how power organises itself, becoming simultaneously visible and inaccessible. A pure exercise in political imagination and situated dissidence that takes us from reproductive technologies to critical pedagogies in formal, non-formal, and informal structures, by way of technocolonialism and turbocapitalism. Without ever taking our eye off the global perspective and our immediate environment: from global care chains to the precarisation, invisibilisation, and offshoring of labour.