working conditions

Artist Lucía C. Pino approaches her sculptural work as a conversation with the materials, the media and the surroundings—in relation to where they come from as well as the place they will occupy—, emphasising their performative aspect and their interdependence with her every move. It is a practice that is not easily defined, permeated by a wide range of interests, influences and concerns, among which Lucía includes the rituals of reading, writing, and doing-with-others. In FONS ÀUDIO #58, Lucía C. Pino presents Non-Slave Tenderness, 2018.

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.

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.

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.