Sonic Acts

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.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Open-weather’s researcher-designer Sophie Dyer and creative geographer Sasha Engelmann, which we couldn’t include the first time around. They share their “origin story” while demonstrating “live” their collaborative dynamic. The poetics and materiality of radio, in its capacity to sense and to resonate at a distance, emerge as a tool for insightful alliances, as well as speculative and radical experiments, from the Feminist Antifascist Weather Front to radio mirrors.

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.