working conditions
Jose Iglesias García-Arenal
In a country like Spain, where rural areas have historically been subject to dispossession and marginalisation, Jose’s work reveals the ravages of extractivism, from lithium mining to solar panel monocultures. He links these practices to historical processes of conquest, latifundism, and the privatisation of the countryside, while also exploring the ways in which communities resist and seek to build alternatives. In this podcast, Jose Iglesias García-Arenal invites us to imagine interstices of possibility where community resistance, historical memories, and art come together to redefine how we inhabit the world. We talk about invented traditions, olive trees, sheep, looms, and the complex interactions between past, present and future.
Teresa Rubio
Kathrin Böhm
In this podcast, we open up a glossary of concepts that affect and leave their mark on Kathrin Böhm's many constellations and collective projects. From the notion of compost—which triggered a radical shift in her way of working and interacting with her material archive in recent years—to a reassessment of the very idea of economy, which, as Katherine Gibson writes, helps us discern spaces of value production that are not immediately apparent. We talk about how these other strategies and ways of doing things lead us to qualify and problematise alternative ways of understanding social and/or participatory practices, and even to read the idea of community critically.
Carlos Motta
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.
Françoise Vergès
In this podcast, Françoise Vergès unpacks the social and environmental politics of cleaning and waste, charting and questioning temporal and spatial interactions that create a neutral site of deprivation, exhaustion and exploitation. She sheds light on the economy and politics of exhaustion, pointing out the role of racial capitalism in the climate crisis. Vergès suggests a political re-reading and understanding of vital needs and natural elements through notions of cleaning, hygiene and medicine, and raises revolutionary questions about the prefabricated assumptions of justice and social transformation through re-thinking the museum.