RWM MACBA: Recent Episodes
Macba
Radio Web MACBA (RWM) is an online radio project based at MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. A radio-beyond-radio that dwells in the folds and intersections of critical thinking, contemporary art, artistic research, activism, knowledge transfer, sound… and everything in between. We produce podcasts which can be listened to on demand, downloaded, and/or subscribed to. And we also publish essays, texts, and related documentation, on the verge of filecasting.
In this podcast, we sit down with transdisciplinary researcher and curator Yaiza Hernández to get to the heart of her deep-dive research into what she has coined Terminal Tourism. Drawing upon the long tradition of academic scholarship, but also from a situated perspective as a native from the Canary Islands, Yaiza unpacks the constellation of problems orbiting the travel industry, from environmental degradation to rampant gentrification and the subsequent disruption of local infrastructures, and a whole host of other socioeconomic inequalities.
In this two-voice podcast, researcher-designer Sophie Dyer and creative geographer Sasha Engelmann weave speculative storytelling through glitchy weather satellite transmissions in a dialogue tinged with the feminist meta-practices that run deep beneath their collective operations. Together, they talk about NOAA satellites, about building alliances and about weather literacy, occasionally interviewing each other as friends and guiding us through the generous network of feminist thinkers that informs their practice.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Tucuman artist Gabriel Chaile, which we couldn’t include the first time around. We talk about his education through a mix of public school, recounted memories, and observing family handicrafts. Once again, we defend slowness as a way of being and living in the world, and we join Nestor García Canclini in wondering how to think about the coexistence of elements or groups that consider themselves different, in our turbulent times.
In this podcast, we talk to Iranian artist pantea about studying in Edinburgh, about the peat bogs of Scotland and about the misconceptions surrounding wetlands. We discuss agency, more-than-human subjectivities and the (im)possibilities that open up when thinking-with sundew, and about her experience with the Khamoosh listening and archiving community.
In this podcast interdisciplinary writer, artist, editor, curator and plant lover Imani Mason Jordan reflects on the conflicting meanings of community, which they sum up as “ a feeling and a relationship”. Finding guidance in the writings of Audre Lorde (and others)—through collective reading and listening—, Imani makes an urgent call for action, in order to disrupt and overcome the numbing of our emotions. Cadence, resonance, repetition and the bodily urgency of protest speeches operate in their artistic vocabulary as key tools for world-breaking, as well as world-making.
In this first episode, we revisit the early days of Video-Nou and its connection with other artists who were also starting to work with video in Catalonia. Hand in hand with Lluïsa Roca, Luisa Ortínez, Xefo Guasch and Carles Ameller, we look at the collective’s relationship with the counterculture, the underground, and libertarian movements. And we consider the particularities of video as a tool for documentary, communication, creation, and protest, with special attention to its uses within the political and social context of the period of the Spanish transition. We explore strategies such as feedback and counterinformation, and we get a behind-the-scenes insight into the making of Video-Nou’s first projects: Gràcia. Espais Verds (February-March 1977) and Campanya política per a la Lliga de Catalunya (April-May 1977), better known as the Video-Bus.
In this podcast, images are a device for weaving complex relationships, with agency and a host of constituent agents that modulate their meaning. Visual artist and researcher Ona Bros charts an almost chronological story of her life, in which babbling, impropriety and questioning sustain other imaginaries and other ways of being and relating. Direct action, images that stain, ethical porn, gestating bodies and communities of ice create space for the constant sense of not belonging and the need to sustain life.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Chilean writer, editor and academic Macarena García, which we couldn’t include the first time around. Macarena talks about her interest in observing and analysing how processes and consensuses in culture, society, ethics and politics are put to the test in the field of childhood studies. She focuses on artistic expressions such as the case study of children’s literature, and more specifically scrapbooks. We also chart a brief genealogy of picture books and the many narrative strategies that issue from it: from challenging books to non-educational relations between text and image, and the figure of the ellipsis.
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.
In this podcast, cultural manger and mediator David Yubraham Sánchez expands on critical thoughts formulated in educational spaces, in constant conversation with others—an exercise in examining racist and colonial patterns in order to dismantle fictitious equivalences in the name of diversity. Thinking-by-doing—with collective work as his main methodology—gives rise to a profusion of tips, strategies and objectives to guide the work of anti-racist mediation, education, and cultural programming. This involves problematising the hollowing out of rights and cultural policies, identifying absences and erasures in democratic memory and national heritage, and implementing the political practice of listening.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with choreographer, performer and artist Itxaso Corral, which we couldn’t include the first time around. With Itxaso, we embrace the complexity of being-and-doing-with-others, and we look inside some of the notions that underlie her thinking-by-doing: hijacked words that can be set free, such as tenderness, naivety, empathy, modesty and cringe. We also open up a host of questions—poetic, political, and convivial—in order to spend some time with them, leaving them unanswered. How far do things go? Is reading a text just reading a text? Does a written text remain only on the page? Is there no vibration? Who is legitimized, and to say what? Which things are accepted as legitimized and which are left out? Do I seem to be alone? Where can we come together?
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.
Hamja Ahsan is a British artist, writer, curator and fanzine enthusiast. He is known for his raw critique of dominant culture and power structures, particularly in the context of cultural representation and identity. In this podcast, we talk Hamja Ahsan about the language of Shy Radicals, about neurodiversity and Islamophobia, and about the fictional utopian shy people’s Republic of Aspergistan. But also about fried chicken. Yes, mostly about fried chicken, really.
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.
In PROBES #37.2, crooners, experimental artists, and rock legends exchange notes at their EA (electricionists anonymous) meeting on their mutual dependency on microphones and loudspeakers (feedback welcome).
In this podcast, we talk to Chilean writer, editor and academic Macarena García about her working methods with children in schools and other shared educational spaces. We talk about challenging picture-books, about fascination and overflow as tools for collective transformation, and about what happens to bodies when they are together. We also explore the workings of censorship and how children’s literature approaches subjects such as death, sex, racism, dictatorship, feminism, gender identity and the climate crisis.
Through media such as lectures, performance, video, drawing, installation, and sculpture, Haig Aivazian’s multifaceted works intricately blend the personal and the geopolitical as well as micro and macro narratives. They uncover or perhaps even fabricate complex threads, timelines and visual networks with multiple layers of meaning and ambiguity. His stories are intended to puzzle, reveal intangible connections, and evoke a sense of ghostly friction among conflicting ideas. In this podcast, we talk to Haig Aivazian about counter-propaganda, sports, blackouts, Palestine, fugitivity and what he calls “the dumping grounds of democracy”.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with environmental historian, researcher and writer Troy Vettese. We talk about Animal Rights activism, pet ownership, golf and the urgent need to go from critique to action.
In PROBES #37, we consider the revolution ushered in by the thermionic valve and, in particular, the disorienting but transformative changes electrical amplification brought into a world until then predicated solely on acoustical laws. We then examine the cybernetic entanglement of its mirrored portals (the microphone and the loudspeaker) through the generative instability of feedback which, it turns out, has accessible expressive powers...
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with poet, activist, sound artist, sound sculptor and curator Antye Greie. We unpack some of her strategies to deploy what she calls "feminist sonic technologies". And we do so, starting with her own understanding of unlearning.
Lydia Ourahmane is an Algerian-born multidisciplinary artist who has spent much of her life in the UK. In her installations and interventions, the notions of object and subject—considered separate in Western thought—converge and dialogue between the public and private, the alien and borrowed, migration and extractivism, everyday life and the affective materiality of things. In this podcast we talk (in total darkness) to Lydia about her relationship with echo as a phenomenon for the creation of negative space, about listening as a trigger for singular experience. We also talk about her connection to spirituality through her family experience, a community persecuted for its faith in her home country. Finally, we hear some open questions about the idea of home, belonging and freedom, and about the miraculous, the unexplained and the absolute.
In this podcast, we talk to Gabriel Chaile about slowness as a space of resistance, about the austere and changing bodies of his functional sculptures, and about poverty, memory and oblivion. Following the rhythm of his own life, we travel from the shores of Tucumán to the centre of the contemporary art world and the international scene. And along the way, we discover and lay the first stones of his Centro Cultural Ambulante [Travelling Cultural Centre], which is not really a space but a beacon calling for an attitude to life and connection with others.
In this podcast, we talk to Cornelia Sollfrank about art, technology and gender, and about performance, bodies and networks. We go back to the very early days with collective projects such as Frauen und Technik and OBN—groundbreaking experiences in which the screen opened up to make way for this other enormous, virtual space to be inhabited. A wealth of practices, projects and experiences—which she now refers to as techno-feminism—in a career that has led her to explore the commons, organizational aesthetics, and the role of the law and of copyright in defining (or not defining) where an original work of art begins and ends in the digital realm.
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 we talk to environmental historian, researcher and writer Troy Vettese about veganism, ecology and geoengineering and about neoliberalism and the environmental crisis. We look at past examples of vegan socialist experiences and understand the urgency of including animal rights in radical thought. We also examine the tension between nature and the market, accepting the impossibility of dealing with the climate crisis through eco-modernist techno-solutions.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Mexican artist Juan Arturo García. With the design of neutral Spanish as a case study, we broaden our conversation around living and dead languages, dialects, the uses of language and the dynamics of linguistic prestige. We imagine subtitling as a creative space, while rethinking typography from a political lens, questioning legibility and conventional strategies through his own practice.
The work of artist Itxaso Corral calls on an extensive glossary of concepts, media, and practices that explore beyond the bounds of closed definitions, in a gesture that simultaneously expands the scope of possibility of so-called live arts. In this podcast, Itxaso Corral shares with us the small rituals that give shape and meaning to her artistic activities: pulsations of life that emerge through performance, dance, singing, and calligraphy as experiential spaces, which are the result of lived experience and long durations, and of the energy that arises from learning and doing with others.
In this podcast, we talk with Edwin van der Heide about using radio as a way into the public, outside world, and about radio as a highly regulated space that sometimes resists experimentation. We discuss his early interest in short and medium wave radio and how it came to be expressed in these immersive, awe-inspiring installations, and we speculate about the production of meaning inherent in each of them.
It’s tempting to describe Marissa Malik’s practice as a crossroads—one where music production intersects with mysticism, DJing and astrology. But the way she talks about these complementary aspects instead suggests that they are all on a sort of Möbius strip, a continuum with no beginning or end, on which they harmonically coexist and feed back on each other. This paradoxical geometry relies on a worldview and a critical gaze that has allowed Marissa to explore and put her own spin on the correlation between language, racial segregation and gender, especially in the framework of diaspora communities like her own. We sat down with Marissa Malik to talk about language, rituals, migration, mysticism, barriers, queerness and sexuality in her musical domain.
In Núria Güell’s (Vidreres, 1981) practice, the museum-institution becomes the actual medium of her art: she manipulates, squeezes and expands it, questions its rationale, blind spots and contradictions, and seeks to transcend its boundaries. Her works always spring from social conflicts that directly affect her, and she uses the strategies of art as platforms to dismantle the logic of power. In this podcast we talk to Núria Güell about her working methods and about the activation of artistic practices that become mechanisms for listening. We reflect on the realm of ethics and morality in art, and on disobediences, psychoanalysis, precarities, the status of the artist and the urgent need to recover the subversive potential of contemporary art.
Researcher and creative technologist Yasmine Boudiaf describes her art practice as “tin foil hat research”. She creates playful projects rooted in deep research methodologies ranging from writing to computing, in order to shed some light on the shape-shifting White Devil tactics behind ruling powers and new technologies. In this podcast, Yasmine Boudiaf walks us through some of her experiences in the corporate world and the performative aspects of negotiating the deeply entrenched British class system. She talks about AI ethics and the theater behind policy-making as well as soft power and Newspeak.
In PROBES #36.2, Chris Cutler encounters more claviolines, ondiolines, musitrons, solovoxes, electroniums and ondiolas as they shape-shift to accommodate the (sometimes out there) needs of pop, jazz, lounge, experimental, soundtrack and avant garde composers.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with the leader, activist mother and poet Yaneth Valencia that we were unable to include the first time around.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Bouchra Khalili that we were unable to include the first time around. We talk about her relationship with photography and the haunting presence of history in it.
In this podcast we talk to psychoanalyst, writer and academic Suely Rolnik about micropolitics and macropolitics, about the common and the subjective. We talk about air and about the present, and about how difficult it has become to inspire and to conspire. We abandon the idea of the apocalypse but also that of paradise. We turn our attention to spiders, pausing to observe their strong and flexible threads, and we consider creating provisional spiderwebs to allow the emergence of other worlds. For this weaving, Suely borrows and tells us about Guarani terms such as ñe'é, which means word and also soul.
In this podcast, Singaporean organizer, writer, and scholar Charmaine Chua shares her research on the containerization of global logistics from the vantage of the Global South. Her journey begins aboard a container ship, embodying ethnographic observation and field work, as well as a radical rereading of the naval archive records of the colonial project. The mix of methodologies, experiences and data highlights the incongruities and the environmental, legal, and labour abuses that appear in the capitalist wet dream of efficiency in global trade.
Bernat Daviu (b. Fonteta, Baix Empordà, 1985) is an artist who considers himself a painter first and foremost. A painter aware that the death of painting has long been anticipated but has not yet arrived. As such, he expands it and allows it to mutate into objects, costume design, dance, performance, video, music, and art installations. He activates painting, sets it in motion, and turns it into a mirror of our surroundings. Daviu is interested in the borderlands between art and non-art. In this podcast, he talks about his 2020 work Stanza, in which painted canvases break free from the frame and start to dance and interact with other artistic disciplines.
In PROBES #36, Chris Cutler continues to follow wildly diverse applications of novel electronic keyboards; the shape-shifting Ondioline, the many variations of the Clavioline and the electric Sackbut - from Sun Ra to Scelsi, Al Kooper to the Marvelettes – and we definitively settle the question of John Lennon, the Beatles and the orange.
Yaneth Valencia is a leader, activist mother and poet. She is also community organizer of Lila Mujer, a political space for support, collective creation and affirmation of the lives of black women with HIV, which was founded in 2003 in the working class neighbourhoods of Cali, Colombia. In this podcast, we talk with Yaneth Valencia about the overlapping vulnerabilities that affect black women with HIV in Colombia, linking racism to the lack of a public health system and analysing the relationship between the virus and patriarchal violence, which is exacerbated by war and the forced displacement of black and indigenous peoples from their lands.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the conversation with artist, weaver, writer, poet and indigenous researcher Elvira Espejo Ayca that we were unable to include the first time around. We talked about the flow of linguistic structures and writing processes, introducing the notion of “oraliture” and the importance of the rhythm of song in the exchanges that take place in her community.
Artist, filmmaker, and writer Arjuna Neuman has been working in tandem with philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva since 2016. The result of their collaboration is an ongoing series of films and installations that merge poetics and critical theory, in a dreamlike polyptych that is disorientating and grounding in equal parts. Their so-called “elemental cinema”—part documentary and part personal essay—considers often overlapping events and disasters of the past, present and future history of the planet: from slavery and police brutality to ecological collapse and the biodiversity crisis.We sat down with Arjuna Neuman to talk about planetary body horror, wind, clouds, blues, tenderness, and the not so evident autobiographical threads in their films.
Mapa Teatro is a laboratory of social imagination founded by Heidi, Elizabeth and Rolf Abderhalden in Paris in 1984. In 1986 it moved to Bogotá, where it operates today. Since its earliest days, Mapa Teatro has worked in the field of live arts, with a commitment to collective practices and the creation of temporary experimental communities. Like good cannibals, its members work on transforming materials to create new universes that embrace testimonies and fiction, poetics and politics. In this podcast, we chat to Mapa Teatro about 40 years of practice and extended fraternity. We talk about living archives, happenings, witnesses, and fiction.
Artist and filmmaker, Shezad Dawood speaks with social and geopolitical anthropologist Mark Nuttall, who’s work is embedded in circumpolar rural communities, tracing the entanglements between climate change, extractive industries and identity of place. They discuss the accumulated residues, ecological cosmologies and shifting futures that have emerged from the deepest corners of the oceans, the icy subsurface and geological entanglements of Greenland’s complex landscapes and the lives they hold. Creation myths, told by Greenlandic storyteller Maria Kreutzmann, bubble up from the dark depths of the ocean and rub up against dramatic changes in the landscape throughout the past century.
In this podcast, we talk to the Mexican artist Juan Arturo García about language and plants—or about how taxonomy overwrote one tradition of thought and replaced it with another, by way of Latin. Which is, paradoxically, a dead imperial language. We take a close look at his practice, concentrating on the role of speculation, fiction, and the archive in the way his stories come together. We talk about the emergence of neutral Spanish, and Juan Arturo tells us about the first stages of a film that explores the strange arrival of a nuclear reactor in Colombia around 1950.
We dig up some outtakes from our conversation with South African artist Sethembile Msezane, who riffs on our disconnection from nature. Movement, water, ancestry and spirituality also come up, along with some side notes on the different types of relationships that institutions and public space make possible.
Over the past 10 years, South African scholar Sarah Nuttall's work has focused on post-colonial criticism, urban theory and literary and cultural studies, especially in relation to Africa and its diasporas. Her current area of interest revolves around water, heavy rainfall, flooding and hydrocolonialism, and how they intersect with materiality, time and daily life. But also around how water can be traced and analysed across works of literary fiction from the African continent. ‘Pluviality’, the umbrella term she coined for this purpose, serves as a conceptual framework and a methodological approach to her study of rain in an era of extreme climate emergency.
We dig up some unreleased bits of our conversation with the Tasmanian-born, Berlin-based experimental cellist and sound artist Anthea Caddy. We talk about the dialogue between her practice and science and academia, but also about infrasound, long wave data, mirrors, reflection, the ungraspable and the negotiation with the environment and space.
Elvira Espejo Ayca is an indigenous artist, weaver, writer, poet and researcher. Her work brings to light collective strategies that resist monoculturalization, moving back and forth between the rural and urban, between ancestral practices and the colonial gaze, between the sentipensamiento (feeling-thinking) of indigenous peoples and the predominance of academic Eurocentrism. In this podcast, we take a deep dive into the actions of the National Museum of Etnography and Folklore (MUSEF) of La Paz (Bolivia) in search of mutual understanding and respect, while weaving and reweaving the historical gaps and bridges between two worlds.
The PROBES AUXILIARIES dig deeper into the main programme topic but are also programmed for your ecstatic listening pleasure; so examples here are edited and sequenced and cut together on the wheels of steal; there’s no talking either (at least not by me), so you need to download the playlist to get the details, backstory and relevance of each of the pieces featured. In this new episode, Hammonds talk, sing, swing, soar, strut and contemplate the universe, and Jerry Goldsmith takes the Novachord out into space and down to the bottom of the sea.
Through a practice that combines documentary, conceptual art, installation, and oral storytelling, Bouchra Khalili explores questions of self-representation, political agency, and the resistance strategies of individuals and communities rendered invisible by the colonial, oppressive, and exclusionary dynamics of nation-states. Who is a witness? Who tells the story? Who documents, archives, and transmits the accounts that reach us? These are the central questions that run through all of Khalili’s work. In this podcast, we talk to Bouchra Khalili about what it means to produce images and to approach film and documentary practice from new places and perspectives.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with the choreographer, performer and artist Maria José Arjona. We talk about travel as a catalyst for her work, about interaction with the spectator, about her repertoire of gestures, about connecting and listening to animality, and about contact with the other side.
Working from the foundations of historical narrative and its constructs, African knowledge systems, and a contemporary take on colonial wounds, South African artist Sethembile Msezane has an interdisciplinary practice that goes beyond critique. In this podcast, Sethembile talks about her rejection of modern throwaway culture, convinced that the history and experiences of ancestors contain clues and know-how that allow us to imagine different futures. She believes that good omens must enter through spirituality and dialogue with ancestors. Art is simply a tool.
Fito Conesa inhabits many languages and disciplines, stretching the chewing gum of his practice to stick on different forms of knowledge, ways of doing, and conversations that are often found outside the white cube. In this podcast, Fito Conesa takes us behind the scenes of the visually and sonically imposing video Helicon (2019), in which a seven-member brass band invokes the end of the world in an almost apocalyptic landscape, in which geological time, human time, and personal time collapse into one.
Anthea Caddy is a Tasmanian-born and now Berlin-based experimental cellist and sound artist who explores projected sound energy through spatial practices that highlight acoustic and physical phenomena. In this podcast, Anthea walks us through her journey from playing cello in rock bands as a teenager to her ongoing research into projected sound energy. She explains her long-term research on directional speakers and the results of the iterations and testing of the parabolic speakers. She also talks about documentation and about the difficulties of approaching large-scale sound performance.
Marc Larré works with video, photography, sculpture and objects, giving free rein to a dilettante practice that entails attentive listening to the materials he handles, and also to the context—to his surroundings. In his thinking-by-doing, Marc generates countless unexpected connections between temporary situations, objects, and people, in order to question notions of progress and modernity. In this podcast, we talk to Marc Larré about megaliths, stones, and anti-monuments. As we listen, artisanal practices, traces, frictions, clay, and plaster make an appearance. We talk about the experiential dimension of his practice and about the connections and synergies with the art community in Barcelona. And naturally, we also talk about art, about precarity, and about the need to rethink our working conditions, together.
Núria Güell’s artistic practice always starts with a contradiction or social conflict that she feels directly challenged or affected by. These give rise to long collaborative processes in which listening, legal research, negotiation, and confrontation—as well as affinities and affects—become essential creative tools. Her practice is part of her life, and it often involves taking legal, physical, and emotional risks. In FONS AUDIO #55, Núria Güell talks to us about the processes, conversations, research, and formalisation behind the making of Ayuda humanitaria (Humanitarian aid) (2008-2013), a piece she began during the years she spent in in Cuba, which became part of the MACBA Collection in 2021.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Chilean artist Nicole L'Huillier. We talk about the agency of the work and working with other agents.
Antye Greie (aka AGF or poemproducer) is a poet, activist, sound artist, sound sculptor, and curator, born in East Germany and based on the island of Hailuoto in northern Finland for over fifteen years. In this podcast, we talk to Antye Greie about language, sound, and the body. At their intersection, the voice emerges, with its multiple resonances and different ways of introducing the voice of others through her own practice and space of visibility. Along the way, we look at her work and methodology, from the deconstruction of texts to the implementation of what she calls “feminist sonic technologies”.
Dani Admiss is an independent curator, researcher and educator who spent part of her childhood in Dubai before emigrating to the UK and settling in Edinburgh. Her projects are situated at the intersection of art, design, technology and cultural practice and—in a constant search for a sense of belonging—explore infrastructures and relationality. "Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline" emerged in response to the simple and complex question: “How can I be useful?” The answer—by creating a decarbonisation plan for the gallery—gradually took the form of a conversation of many voices, involving various communities in an exercise in social justice and collective learning to rethink the processes of the art world in times of climate emergency.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the conversation with artist and researcher Eugènia Balcells, which we were unable to use the first time around. We share notes on her work Fuga—which she considers seminal to her practice and to her relationship with light—and on the educational project Veure la llum, which was carried out as part of her exhibition Seeing the Light at MACBA in 1996. To wrap up, we talk about her vison for the Eugènia Balcells Foundation: 400 hectares at Les Gavarres, where she can bring together her legacy and establish interdisciplinary dialogue in nature.
Con una trayectoria de varias décadas de prácticas e intercambios entre pecho y espalda, Maria José Arjona explora a través de la performace de larga duración un cuerpo que pendula al borde del abismo de manera afirmativa. Su repertorio de gestos hace parte de un gran archivo en permanente tránsito y transformación, a menudo atravesado por la historia de la performance, aunque siempre vivo. En este podcast, Maria José Arjona mira hacia adelante y hacia atrás, para trazar un diagrama invisible de procesos, acciones y deseos, entre su hacer en solitario y su necesidad de desbordar una política del tiempo con otros artistas, mediante la subversión del tiempo institucional: ¿qué le pasa a la performance y al performer cuando su trabajo pasa por estar ocho horas en un museo?
In PROBES #35 Chris Cutler examines the quiet electronic revolution ushered in by the Hammond organ and excavate traces of the visionary but short-lived Novachord - a polyphonic synthesiser born a quarter-century ahead of its time, which briefly flared - and then disappeared.
Researcher Martin Zeilinger’s work stems from a deep fascination with the grey area where blockchain-related technologies protocols and art intersect. Far from the naive triumphalism of Web3 evangelists, his approach focuses on the artists and projects that actually try to integrate some of the salient features and affordances of distributed, trustless ledgers into their practice. In this podcast, we talk to Martin Zeilinger about the poetic and political potential of the blockchain, while at the same time tracing a somewhat fuzzy timeline that connects 1960s conceptual art to smart contracts, decentralised autonomous organisations and a host of consensus mechanisms.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with curator, artist and cultural producer Eva Rowson that we were unable to include the first time around. Eva expands on her proposition of being nice as an integral part of her curatorial and managing work, while taking into account the challenges of maintaining safe and welcoming spaces. The questions of quotas and infrastructure pop up in the conversation too.
Chilean artist Nicole L'Huillier formulates an antidisciplinary practice that takes up a position on boundaries, generating a liminal and sensorial space in which categories such as architecture, science, music and sound tend to break down and intertwine. Thinking with “surlogics”—the logic of her native south— Nicole defends the need to use multiple kinds of thinking at the same time, and embraces mestizaje, as a way of being and existing that is rich and full of complexity and contradictions. In this podcast, we open up Nicole L'Huillier’s processes, methodologies, and rituals, in conversation with old friends—Gloria Anzaldúa, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Gabriela Mistral, AM Kanngiesser—and strangers. Their membrane-words caress and jolt us. Sounds, vibrations, resonance, structures, and other multiple sensorial transductions invite us to think up, amidst murmuring, other collective ways of being and incarnations.
Artist, composer and researcher Edwin van der Heide expands musical composition and musical language in spatial, interactive, and interdisciplinary directions. His often site-specific, highly immersive installations don’t just take up space: they are a very deliberate inquiry into space itself and into its affordances as an artistic medium and material. Edwin’s pieces create space, modifying its actual and perceived boundaries. They make space present, apparent, and even tangible. In this podcast, we talk to Edwin about art in public space, air pressure, sounds under water, loudspeakers, networks, odd spatial experiences, and sonic phenomenology.
Undead Matter is an unfolding conversation about where life lies in the ever-turning matter of our universe, as it rhythmically resurfaces over millennia. In this new episode, artist, Oreet Ashery speaks with paleontologist Tori Herridge about discoveries in the permafrost, genetic legacies, cloning from the deep past, fertility and the unborn.
Eugènia Balcells (Barcelona, 1943) began her artistic career in the mid-seventies within the conceptual art scene. A pioneer of experimental film, video art, and video installation, she also works with visual scores, artist’s books, objects, performance art, photocopies, sounds, and photographs. Balcells considers herself an interdisciplinary researcher interested in the possibilities of physics, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, sociology, music, and poetry. She brings these disciplines into the field of art, as an agora from which to reimagine and reinvent the world. In FONS AUDIO #54 we join Eugènia Balcells in looking back over a life dedicated to art, pausing to examine some of her works in the MACBA collection.
In this podcast, we talk to philosopher Andrea Soto Calderón about images and power, about the material imagination, desire, and oikonomia. Walking barefoot along this path, we come across minor architectures and silent revolutions. We also consider the possibility of a different geometry of politics, one that turns its back on basic categories of thought such as “fixing”, “establishing” and “substantiating” in favour of inexplicable notions that simultaneously are and are not. Taking this idea further, Andrea suggests replacing the idea of “strategy” and thinking instead about “ways of doing”.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with artist Andrea Francke. We take Andrea’s life experience as a springboard to talk about diversity and difference, while problematising soft, hard, and universalising theories. We also consider possible spaces for learning based on curiosity, care, and vulnerability. Changing the subject, we naturally took the opportunity to delve into The Piracy Project, in collaboration with Eva Weinmayr—and while we were at it, to defend copying and appropriationism as a political and creative space.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with artist Andrea Francke. We take Andrea’s life experience as a springboard to talk about diversity and difference, while problematising soft, hard, and universalising theories. We also consider possible spaces for learning based on curiosity, care, and vulnerability. Changing the subject, we naturally took the opportunity to delve into The Piracy Project, in collaboration with Eva Weinmayr—and while we were at it, to defend copying and appropriationism as a political and creative space.
In this podcast we talk to with writer and researcher Andrea Valdés about pure writing, about heterodoxy, and about spatial optimism. We open up the metaphor of soft tools, and the semantic resonance of organs—be they tongues or genitals—trapped by the technological rudiments of machines. We discuss the use of tape recorders, orality and writing, and the research of Rivolta Femminile self-awareness groups, which tried to find a space for a different kind of speech in a private, female-only environment. The conversation was recorded at Hangar in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, as one of the first moves towards a line research that Andrea had continued to work on to this day.
In this podcast we talk to with writer and researcher Andrea Valdés about pure writing, about heterodoxy, and about spatial optimism. We open up the metaphor of soft tools, and the semantic resonance of organs—be they tongues or genitals—trapped by the technological rudiments of machines. We discuss the use of tape recorders, orality and writing, and the research of Rivolta Femminile self-awareness groups, which tried to find a space for a different kind of speech in a private, female-only environment. The conversation was recorded at Hangar in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, as one of the first moves towards a line research that Andrea had continued to work on to this day.
In this episode, artist Bo Choy speaks with Sayana Namsaraeva, an anthropologist from Buryatia, south-eastern Siberia, exploring the traditional traditions and stories that have emerged from the landscapes surrounding Lake Baikal, the deepest and oldest freshwater lake on the planet, and how these influence worldviews and possibilities for the future.
The PROBES AUXILIARIES dig deeper into the main programme topic but are also programmed for your ecstatic listening pleasure; so examples here are edited and sequenced and cut together on the wheels of steal; there’s no talking either (at least not by me), so you need to download the playlist to get the details, backstory and relevance of each of the pieces featured. In this new episode, Chris Cutler explores otherworldly cruises through the many and wildly various applications of Maurice Martenot’s glorious instrument, with a side bar on the Trautonium.
The PROBES AUXILIARIES dig deeper into the main programme topic but are also programmed for your ecstatic listening pleasure; so examples here are edited and sequenced and cut together on the wheels of steal; there’s no talking either (at least not by me), so you need to download the playlist to get the details, backstory and relevance of each of the pieces featured. In this new episode, Chris Cutler explores otherworldly cruises through the many and wildly various applications of Maurice Martenot’s glorious instrument, with a side bar on the Trautonium.
We sat down with curator and researcher Grant Watson to talk about textiles and their material and social ramifications. Instead, we ended up talking about his interview-based practice, essentially producing an extremely meta interview on interviews and interviewing. In this podcast, Grant talks about enacting, editing, demographics, transference, capturing the atmosphere of an interview, and other issues that he explores in one of his main ongoing projects, How We Behave.
We sat down with curator and researcher Grant Watson to talk about textiles and their material and social ramifications. Instead, we ended up talking about his interview-based practice, essentially producing an extremely meta interview on interviews and interviewing. In this podcast, Grant talks about enacting, editing, demographics, transference, capturing the atmosphere of an interview, and other issues that he explores in one of his main ongoing projects, How We Behave.
Hablamos con la artista Andrea Francke sobre su interés en las infraestructuras y proyectos participativos. Inclusión, hospitalidad y los ecos del proyecto colonial aparecen en la conversación. Andrea va deshaciendo la idea de fracaso mientras reflexiona acerca de los desafíos que conlleva la elaboración de políticas y marcos legales institucionales. Hablamos también de categorías de arte importadas, de trabajos invisibles y de la idea de caridad como un callejón sin salida.
Hablamos con la artista Andrea Francke sobre su interés en las infraestructuras y proyectos participativos. Inclusión, hospitalidad y los ecos del proyecto colonial aparecen en la conversación. Andrea va deshaciendo la idea de fracaso mientras reflexiona acerca de los desafíos que conlleva la elaboración de políticas y marcos legales institucionales. Hablamos también de categorías de arte importadas, de trabajos invisibles y de la idea de caridad como un callejón sin salida.
In this new instalment of Undead Matter, Cultural theorist, Astrida Neimanis speaks with permafrost hydrologist, Nikita Tananaev, discussing the cultural, philosophical and ecological implications of permafrost degradation as it disrupts ancient ecosystems suspended in the ice.
In this new instalment of Undead Matter, Cultural theorist, Astrida Neimanis speaks with permafrost hydrologist, Nikita Tananaev, discussing the cultural, philosophical and ecological implications of permafrost degradation as it disrupts ancient ecosystems suspended in the ice.
Curator, artist and cultural producer Eva Rowson talks about her early contact with hospitality, collective learning experiences such as Open School East, the value of uncharismatic work, throwing parties with Andrea Francke, life lessons of a croissant, and how the best theory comes from practice.
Curator, artist and cultural producer Eva Rowson talks about her early contact with hospitality, collective learning experiences such as Open School East, the value of uncharismatic work, throwing parties with Andrea Francke, life lessons of a croissant, and how the best theory comes from practice.
In PROBES #34 a sequence of new, purely electronic, instruments appear – amongst them (the) electrophon, kurbelspharophon, ondes Martenot, dynophone, croix sonore, pianorad, trautonium and mixtur trautonium – none having any obvious place in the existing vocabulary of musics. In parallel an alien aesthetic begins to redefine the parameters of ‘musical’ sound.
In PROBES #34 a sequence of new, purely electronic, instruments appear – amongst them (the) electrophon, kurbelspharophon, ondes Martenot, dynophone, croix sonore, pianorad, trautonium and mixtur trautonium – none having any obvious place in the existing vocabulary of musics. In parallel an alien aesthetic begins to redefine the parameters of ‘musical’ sound.
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.
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.
Undead Matter, a new series by Sophie J Williamson, is an unfolding conversation about where life lies in the ever-turning matter of our universe, as it rhythmically resurfaces over millennia. In this third episode, writer, Daisy Hildyard speaks with marine microbiologist, Karen Lloyd about 100-million-year-old microbes, that breathe and excrete minerals: bridging the organic and the non-organic, the living and the non-living.
Undead Matter, a new series by Sophie J Williamson, is an unfolding conversation about where life lies in the ever-turning matter of our universe, as it rhythmically resurfaces over millennia. In this third episode, writer, Daisy Hildyard speaks with marine microbiologist, Karen Lloyd about 100-million-year-old microbes, that breathe and excrete minerals: bridging the organic and the non-organic, the living and the non-living.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with artist and writer Clàudia Pagès that we were unable to include the first time around. We talk about living and writing in different languages, about the fragile balance between precision and artefacts, about Spanglish, and about standing up for Spanishisms. We also look into shared readings as a strategy for thinking together.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with artist and writer Clàudia Pagès that we were unable to include the first time around. We talk about living and writing in different languages, about the fragile balance between precision and artefacts, about Spanglish, and about standing up for Spanishisms. We also look into shared readings as a strategy for thinking together.
In this podcast, scholar and curator Olga Goriunova talks about the shelf life of marketing data, about legal persons and digital subjects, reading statistics as poetry, and the many mysteries of personalised targeting. Olga’s concept of Digital Subjects looks at how machine learning crunches data from search engine queries, e-commerce, social network activity and more into categories... to further enhance marketing tactics, political communication and similar practices.
In this podcast, scholar and curator Olga Goriunova talks about the shelf life of marketing data, about legal persons and digital subjects, reading statistics as poetry, and the many mysteries of personalised targeting. Olga’s concept of Digital Subjects looks at how machine learning crunches data from search engine queries, e-commerce, social network activity and more into categories... to further enhance marketing tactics, political communication and similar practices.
Cultural worker, researched and artist Daniel Gasol describes himself as a “faggot child of the proletariat and cultural worker,” not (just) to provoke a response, but as a carefully calibrated strategy, fully aware that it immediately highlights the class privilege that informs any contemporary artistic practice and possibility of being. In this podcast, makes an against-the-grain reading of Spain’s Vagrancy Law (1933-1970) and Law of Social Danger (1970-1995) through the prism of class, in which he reviews literature and criminal records from the National Archive of Catalonia in order to show the criminalisation of the underprivileged classes and of the proletarian body.
Cultural worker, researched and artist Daniel Gasol describes himself as a “faggot child of the proletariat and cultural worker,” not (just) to provoke a response, but as a carefully calibrated strategy, fully aware that it immediately highlights the class privilege that informs any contemporary artistic practice and possibility of being. In this podcast, makes an against-the-grain reading of Spain’s Vagrancy Law (1933-1970) and Law of Social Danger (1970-1995) through the prism of class, in which he reviews literature and criminal records from the National Archive of Catalonia in order to show the criminalisation of the underprivileged classes and of the proletarian body.
Undead Matter, a new series by Sophie J Williamson, is an unfolding conversation about where life lies in the ever-turning matter of our universe, as it rhythmically resurfaces over millennia. In this second episode, poet Myung Mi Kim speaks with geographer, Kathryn Yusoff about the lives and histories demarcated in the silence between words and amongst rock strata.
Undead Matter, a new series by Sophie J Williamson, is an unfolding conversation about where life lies in the ever-turning matter of our universe, as it rhythmically resurfaces over millennia. In this second episode, poet Myung Mi Kim speaks with geographer, Kathryn Yusoff about the lives and histories demarcated in the silence between words and amongst rock strata.
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.
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.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Argentinian writer and researcher Flavia Dzodan.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Argentinian writer and researcher Flavia Dzodan.
Undead Matter, a new series by Sophie J Williamson, is an unfolding conversation about where life lies in the ever-turning matter of our universe, as it rhythmically resurfaces over millennia. In the first episode, artist and poet, Himali Singh Soin and astrobiologist, Prof Chandra Wickramasinghe discuss signs of life from the cosmos, the theory of panspermia and the biosphere of the galaxy.
Undead Matter, a new series by Sophie J Williamson, is an unfolding conversation about where life lies in the ever-turning matter of our universe, as it rhythmically resurfaces over millennia. In the first episode, artist and poet, Himali Singh Soin and astrobiologist, Prof Chandra Wickramasinghe discuss signs of life from the cosmos, the theory of panspermia and the biosphere of the galaxy.
In this new Auxiliary by Chris Cutler, we’ll find the Theremin at work in art ensembles, symphony orchestras, a jazz group, rock bands and on film and television scores – both alone and in quantity –, and there’s a rare sighting of Nikolai Obukhov’s Croix Sonore from his extraordinary Third and Last Testament.
In this new Auxiliary by Chris Cutler, we’ll find the Theremin at work in art ensembles, symphony orchestras, a jazz group, rock bands and on film and television scores – both alone and in quantity –, and there’s a rare sighting of Nikolai Obukhov’s Croix Sonore from his extraordinary Third and Last Testament.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with philosopher, writer, and teacher Marina Garcés. We talk about experience transmission vs models, paradoxes, counterpower and learning from each other.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with philosopher, writer, and teacher Marina Garcés. We talk about experience transmission vs models, paradoxes, counterpower and learning from each other.
Teresa Lanceta is an artist, art historian, researcher, and teacher. In this conversation, the sense of touch reclaims space from the gaze. At the same time, we recover the wisdom of weaving in terms of community, as an open source code for those who know and perform it. And through this repetitive, necessary gesture, technique becomes form, and form becomes language. Thus the margins disappear and give way to rhombuses, torn bits, darning, mending... depending on what’s going on at that moment in time.
Teresa Lanceta is an artist, art historian, researcher, and teacher. In this conversation, the sense of touch reclaims space from the gaze. At the same time, we recover the wisdom of weaving in terms of community, as an open source code for those who know and perform it. And through this repetitive, necessary gesture, technique becomes form, and form becomes language. Thus the margins disappear and give way to rhombuses, torn bits, darning, mending... depending on what’s going on at that moment in time.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with researcher and activist Jara Rocha. We talk about research as an interdependent practice and we call for complexity. Along the way, we speculate on non-coercive forms of computation and consider some case studies from the collaborate project Possible Bodies and its spin-off, Underground Division.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with researcher and activist Jara Rocha. We talk about research as an interdependent practice and we call for complexity. Along the way, we speculate on non-coercive forms of computation and consider some case studies from the collaborate project Possible Bodies and its spin-off, Underground Division.
We talk to Argentinian writer and researcher Flavia Dzodan about fashion, opulence, peripheries, phrenology, taxonomies, canons of beauty, luxury fakes, and migrant detention centres. An intense journey that touches on her personal history and includes references to other writers, notes on her methodology, and a few potshots at centres of power.
We talk to Argentinian writer and researcher Flavia Dzodan about fashion, opulence, peripheries, phrenology, taxonomies, canons of beauty, luxury fakes, and migrant detention centres. An intense journey that touches on her personal history and includes references to other writers, notes on her methodology, and a few potshots at centres of power.
In PROBES #33 we begin to trace the impact of the application of electricity on the world of music and look more closely at the Musical Telegraph, the two-hundred-ton Telharmonium (a 19th century mechanical synthesizer) in America, as well as the Theremin and the visionary Rhythmicon in the USSR.
We talk with philosopher, writer, and teacher Marina Garcés about education and knowledge, about the future, and about time as raw material. We consider the question of how to appear and think with others in this present moment, which demands our active involvement. We discuss the meeting of unequals, and the possibility of strangeness becoming a link. We also explore the logic of the sinking ship or “every man for himself” and the evolution of the words “disobedience” and “freedom”, which leads Marina to emphasise the importance of forming alliances rather than thinking from the reductionist position of unity. At the same time, she invites us to imagine how to weave together worlds that are falling apart.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with sound artist and musician Jessica Ekomane. We talk about sci-fi and emancipatory spaces, her VR project, her approach to live shows and her collaborations.
Amongst the new acoustic inventions, Chris Cutler highlights here the Rumitone, the Uberorgan, a whole Anarchestra, Philip Dadson's Sproings, a Violimba, some scraper flutes, an Aquavine, Diego Stocco's Custom-built Orchestra, an elastic aerophone-centriphone, Leonardo da Vinci's viola organista, Martin Molin's heroic Marble Machine and many other hopeful and inspired monsters.
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.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with architect and the senior researcher at Forensic Architecture, Samaneh Moafi. We talk about strategies for establishing cases of ecocide, about the complexity of analysing satellite images, about carbon monoxide mapping, and about working in networks.
In a body of work that encompasses the creation of texts, recordings, performances, concerts, websites, listening sessions, educational workshops, and archives of conversations, Jaume Ferrete explores everything that affects and influences the ideologies of the voice. His projects openly refrain from naturalising identity and address vocal production as a complex social phenomenon, shaped by the surrounding echoes and reverberations.
In this podcast, Jaume Ferrete talks about Helen Harper, about the bodily discipline of telephone operators, and about the Voder as a clear example of drag. He cites deafness as a crucial phenomenon fuelling the history of sound technologies and connects some key moments—from the Voder to WaveNet—in the development of voice synthesis technologies.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with writer and researcher Cara New Daggett. We talk about the Mayapple Energy Transition Collective, feminist citation practices, collective writing and the difficulties academia still has with such exercises. We share the traumatic experience of being trolled after writing her essay "Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire". Coping with the pandemic and parenting with the climate crisis on the horizon are also brought to the table.
It’s not just that Marc Vives’s work eludes categories and concise descriptions, which it does. Rather, it is like a kind of art of elusion itself, a tenacious and obstinate exercise in dodging limits and clear formalisations. His is a generative systems art, an alchemy of closeness, a kind of cartomancy that zeroes in on social relations and interpersonal connections. And It tends to put pressure on the logic of the white cube and the logic of cultural management, one thing on top of the other, all at once. In this podcast we talk to Marc Vives about swimming, about nerves, about floors stripped of paint, and about strategies for eschewing comfort and courting risk and emptiness in the usually safe environment of the art world.
Multidisciplinary artist Cecilia Bengolea sees dance as a tool and a medium for empathy and emotional exchange. She is particularly interested in anthropological research on contemporary and archaic forms of dance, and devotes herself to learning techniques, movements, and choreographies from around the world, using them to shape her own artistic vocabulary: an embodied movement and dance archive—built up individually and collectively—, in which the body becomes an animated sculpture for performance, video, and installations. In this podcast, Cecilia Bengolea talks about her life journey, a state between constant flux and sensual impulse that draws on Thai boxing and pole dancing as well as contemporary dance and dancehall.
Jessica Ekomane is a sound artist and composer, and a lecturer in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Ekomane’s quadraphonic performances and installations approach algorithmic/computer music as a social practice that is grounded in questions such as the relationship between individual perception and collective dynamics, and explores listening expectations and their societal roots. In this podcast, we talk about the freedom of play, eMule, pipe organs, the limitations and flexibility of Max/MSP, early non-Western sound synthesis, DIY research, quotas, minimalism, and her early love for Ligeti and Destiny's Child.
In PROBES #32 Chris Culter traces the history of some newly invented instruments (in the 20th century), including the Chromelodion, the Boo, the Mazdaphone, the Quadrangulis Reversum, the Crystal Baschets, Harry Bertoia’s Sonambiente, the unearthly Daxophone and Arthur Harris’ Mother Lap Cello Harp, Whispering Harp and the14.5 metre viol, whose lowest strings are inaudible to the human ear.
The work of artist Clàudia Pagés unfolds and contracts in many forms. Words, the body, and movement circulate in multiple directions through her processes, forging a tangled linguistic web of micro-narratives that involve critically listening to the immediate environment, and recording it through persistent writing. In this podcast, we open Clàudia Pagés’s box of tricks and tools. Repetition, 'zoom-ins', physical and metaphorical shifts, and translation emerge as some of her main strategies, while singing, composing, and dancing come together as desire and a pure space of experimentation and possibility.
Possible Bodies questions and problematises the formulation, conception, and rendering of bodies across different 3D technologies such as modelling, tracking and scanning. Their affirmative critical research draws attention to the ways in which these techniques end up implementing and even amplifying a host of prejudices based on race, gender, class, age and ability which, far from being circumstantial, are woven into the actual source code of all sorts of applications. We talk to Femke Snelting about embodiments, optimisation, and 3D disasters, about the possible and the probable, parametric interfaces, and open standards, and about disobedient action research.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with French sound artist Aho Ssan. We talk about his African heritage, his influences and we pay homage to two big names in electronic music, who sadly are no longer with us: Pita and Mika Vainio.
Reassessing and defamiliarizing historical narratives that sit at the core of white patriarchal societies, is a necessary feminist practice and one at which Cara New Daggett, writer and researcher in the field of energy politics, excels at. In this podcast, energy, work, utopian demands, and unions, become intertwined with oil cultures, petromasculinities and ecomodernism, to reflect on growth, dependency, debt and energy transitions beyond extractivism. Degrowth, desire, pleasure, feminist science and new story-telling strategies are revealed as key ingredients for the recipe to reimagine ecologically generous ways of life on Earth.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with writer, researcher and curator Maria Ptqk. We open the door to indigenous epistemologies that help us identify Western mechanisms of knowledge production and legitimisation, we problematise the notion of invasive species, and, three decades after the Cyborg Manifesto, we put a question from Maria Ptqk to Donna Haraway in a bottle.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with essayist and researcher Jaime Vindel. We explore the aesthetic rift generated in modernity, between art and ecology and the city and the countryside, with particular reference to two of its big icons: petrol stations and car culture.
In previous episodes we have hinted at limits as an interesting feature of objects that are often fuzzy or vague, and therefore hard to outline. This time around, we take a radically different approach to limits. A much darker, urgent take on boundaries and edges, if you will. This is not so much about ontological boundaries, but rather about the dangers of looking at the world with no limits in mind. In dialogue with Andrea Ballestero and Chris Korda. Music by Jessica Ekomane.
In this podcast we talk to the queer collective El Palomar about art, dissidence, and pedagogy. We dive deep into their strategies for self-care and resilience. We talk about the importance of producing disobedient, abject, situated genealogies, despite the obstacles to remembering the past in Spain. We share the experience and trauma of embodied research, and reread the pandemic experience through the lens of the lessons of the silenced AIDS crisis. Touch and queer parties emerge as political possibility and bastions of resistance where drives are liberated, limits are transgressed, and the hostilities of a hetero-centric world disappear, albeit temporarily.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Marie Hélène Pereira and Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy—two key members of Raw Material Company—. We talk about connecting locally, about working with and empowering Afro communities, about keeping the archive alive, and about working with orality.
Chris Cutler looks at the diversity of instruments extended out from the xylophone and their sometimes surprising use in almost every imaginable musical context.
We talk to the researcher and curator Maria Ptqk about the possible methodological alliances between art and science. We check out her recent years of research, which have crystalised in the exhibition Science Friction. Life among companion species and in other embodiments and projects. We look at the narrative dimension of scientific knowledge, via Donna Haraway, and at the symbiotic relationships between interdependent organisms through the work of Lynn Margulis. We rethink the complex boundaries between the cultural and natural spheres, and we also embrace the monstrous, in order to call for a multispecies paradigm that overturns human supremacy.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with conceptual artist Pere Noguera. Notes on trades and their influence on his work, his use of maps, his homage to Duchamp, and his work with the territory.
We talk to researcher, teacher, and essayist Jaime Vindel about art, entropy and economics. We go into museums and petrol stations to understand their materiality. We talk about the universal exhibitions of the 19th century and how the removal of objects from their places of origin is directly linked to the process of environmental degradation. We look at their steel and glass pavilions, and find the concrete. We also discuss coal and oil, the concept of productivity, and the dark underbelly of certain visual imaginaries
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with writer, researcher and curator Maite Garbayo-Maeztu that we were unable to include the first time around.
In PROBES #31 we begin to consider evolutionary pressures and invented instruments and follow the twists and turns that led the xylophone out of Asia and Africa, spun it around the world and metamorphosed it into the vibraphone; with a coda from the intonarumori.
Aho Ssan is a French musician of Ivorian and Ghanaian descent who has been involved in graphic design and film works under his given name, Desiré Niamké. These practices, like his multiple identity, resonate in his music. In this podcast we talk to Aho Ssan about his grandfather’s lost trumpet and about an Ivory Coast jazz band that’s impossible to track down. Along the way, we share the cinematic tension of his debut LP Simulacrum and the various routes that led him there. Techno’s cultural appropriation, Black Bandcamp, and the glaring lack of representation of black artists in global electronica are part of the road he has travelled and the lessons learnt along the way.
Whether in her teaching or her participation in the popular resistance for universal access to water, Andrea Ballestero’s approach is a feedback exercise that completely blurs the division between theory and practice. Her work advocates a collaborative, feminist modus operandi on ethnography, as well as the affordances of the environment: be that an ecosystem, a regulatory agency, or 'the technolegal devices at the centre of these political mobilisations'. We talk to Andrea Ballestero about aquifers and amorphous futures, about imagination as an essential part of the academic research process, and about the potential of bureaucratic practices as cogs in a possible machinery of change—which does not necessarily have to involve large-scale global transformations.
In FONS AUDIO #52 Cabello/Carceller talk about their two works in the MACBA Collection: 'I Don't Care about Your Gaze Anymore' (February 1994) and 'A/O (The Céspedes Case)' (July 2009-July 2010). Through them, they reflect on blurred identities, on the diverse possibilities of genders and on the need to create new representations that disrupt the traditional patterns structuring our gaze.
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.
Chris Cutler takes us on a stroll through music made (variously) with water, stones, stage props, ice, snow, stalactites, Tesla coils, sand dunes, leaves, flowers, grass, twigs, glass and a coffee can.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with artist Francesc Torres that we were unable to include the first time around.
Luz Pichel is a poet. Her writing comes out of all those places and even others that she did not physically visit but reached through curiosity, imagination, and empathy. The tension between major and minor languages, the liberating potential of a non-stabilised and nob-folklorising use of dialect and the crack of invention opened up by memory and childhood, are some of the paths that her poetry explores.
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.
Chris Culter shows us how artists, composers and performers make water, ice, glass, fire, wind and Styrofoam their soloists in installations, recordings and events designed for concert halls, galleries, the Phillips pavilion, TV series' and open air gatherings.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with instrument designer and maker Peter Blasser that we were unable to include the first time around. We talked about wood working, worldmaking and esoteric instruments.
Antonia Baehr’s works explore the fiction of the everyday and of the theatre, among other themes. That’s how her official bio at the time of writing this starts. But it does not fully convey the level of meticulousness that goes into her performances in order to emphasise every little aspect of the area between everyday life and the theatre. We talk to Antonia Baehr about switching roles, about her strategies for collaboration, some of her alter egos, gender stereotypes, and much, much more. Prepare for a bumpy ride that will take you from scores and Fluxus, to imitation, fetishism, and socks, by way of drag kings, drag queens, S&M, contracts, and even telepathic connections.
In this new PROBES Auxiliary by Chris Cutler, composers and performers expand their classical, contemporary, avant garde, jazz, rock, electronic and installation art vocabularies by incorporating real or virtual collaborations with wildlife, soundscapes, insects, amphibia, birds, whales and wolves. And we learn what a whale has in common with a nightingale.
Writer, researcher and curator Maite Garbayo-Maeztu talks about writing, motherhood and low-intensity abandonment. She examines the aesthetic materiality of bodies and brings up quotations as gestures by which one becomes intertwined with those who came before, like acts of loving alignment. The ideas that emerge from the conversation include the notion of incalculability—the new that emerges between corporalities, like a gift for those whose practice allows for unexpected, totally unplanned, ways of politically enlivening the things around them.
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.
As part of the exhibition "Sampler #4. Things that Happen", Enric Farrés Durán turns the tables on us with a proposal to get Ràdio Web MACBA to talk about his practice. In this podcast, we talk about learning together by doing, about Enric’s multidirectional transfers of knowledge, and about a practice shot through with discourse. We also touch on the aesthetics of sound, the post-human voice, and the limits of editing; we talk about complexes, accents, and the political act of making vulnerability visible; about the loss of control and about the intimate realm impressed onto the dimension of sound. A space for listening in suspended time that gives voice to the people behind this project.
Francesc Torres (Barcelona, 1948) is an artist, essayist, poet, collector, and curator, who has been involved with conceptual art since the late sixties. He has been a pioneering figure in the use of installation as an artistic and narrative device with which to explore the possibilities of the exhibition space, the artistic object, and the interactions that take place between the audience and the art work. Historical memory, understood as a political category, is an another element that runs through his work. In FONS AUDIO #37 Francesc Torres talks about some of his works in the MACBA Collection as he looks back over his years in Paris working with Piotr Kowalski and his early performances in the United States. He also reflects on the aesthetic-political characteristics of installations, on historical memory, collecting, and the role of museums.
Peter Blasser is a designer of electronic instruments and one-of-a-kind in the world of synthesizer builders. His circuit designs catalyse philosophical concepts in the form of whimsical analog synthesizers that have been evolving since he started his company, Ciat-Lonbarde, in Baltimore more than 15 years ago. In this podcast, Peter Blasser introduces us to his environmental instruments and meditates on his view on electronics and synthesizers as a form of creativity. In this podcast, Peter Blasser introduces us to his environmental instruments and reflects on his views on electronics and synthesizers as a form of creativity. He invokes elements such as wood, sunlight, wind, touch and craft in the process.
As part of the exhibition "Sampler #4. Things that Happen", Enric Farrés Duran turns the tables on us with a proposal to get Ràdio Web MACBA to talk about his artistic practice. Here is a small preview of what we’ve been cooking up in this Barcelona-Los Angeles connection: listening on listening, suspended times, recalcitrant amateurism, desperate clawing at the fourth wall, and a few tough journalistic questions.
Violeta Ospina is an artist, an educator, and a facilitator of collaborative projects that pay special attention to sound and the body. Using typical expressions and imaginaries of popular celebrations as raw materials, her work unfolds through multiform devices that seek to intensify the present. Piñatas, scale models, processions, karaoke, carnival, and cabaret all make an appearance in her practice as catalysts for violence and tenderness, which can also awaken the parodic potential that is always latent in everyday situations. Violeta is co-founder of Radio Cava-ret, a project linked to listening and theatricality, which, taking up the baton from the Futurists, calls itself a “radia”: the experimental and erotic flip side of traditional radio.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with artist, researcher and activist Lucía Egaña that we were unable to include the first time around.
Charles Bernstein is a poet, essayist, editor, and professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. Together with Bruce Andrews, he edited the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which gave its name to a movement of more than a hundred poets interested in the radical exploration of writing that flourished in the late 1970s and the 1980s on both the east and west coasts of the United States. In this podcast, we hear Charles Bernstein think aloud about the performativity of poetry and the multiplicity of voice, elaborating on questions such as the sound of writing, presence and absence, orality, aurality and a/orality. Along the way, Bernstein recounts his first textual experience and acknowledges the influence of Artaud, Bob Wilson and the Living Theatre in shaping him as a poet. We also revisit the early discussions of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E constellation, their policy of exchanging poems and essays by setting up horizontal cultural mechanisms, and a collaborative effort to reread poets from past decades in order to write an alternative, non-hegemonic history of American poetry.
We talk to dancer, choreographer, and visual artist La Ribot about key moments in her childhood, the collective creation and delirium of Bocanada Danza, Festival Desviaciones, the UVI group and the subsequent financial and emotional crisis that drove her from London in the nineties, and her encounter with the performing arts boom. She talks to us from the breathing room she has gained with her new centre for dance and teaching in Switzerland. In the midst of comings and goings, we discover moments that allow us to flesh out and strip back the diva, from her childhood wish to be a gypsy and the lasting impression of a little girl’s fascination on seeing a bullfight on TV, to her found object fetishes, the camera-operator, and a (perhaps dreamt) falling out with Joan Brossa.
Mediante la creación de textos, grabaciones, performances, conciertos, sitios web, sesiones de escucha, talleres educativos y archivos de conversaciones, la obra de Jaume Ferrete (Mollet del Vallès, 1980) explora todo aquello que atraviesa y configura las ideologías de la voz. Sus proyectos eluden abiertamente cualquier naturalización de la identidad y examinan la producción vocal como un fenómeno social complejo, modelado por los ecos y las reverberaciones circundantes.
In PROBES #29 composers turn to nature, not as pastorale but as concrete musical resources. Chris Cutler looks at animals, vegetables and one or two minerals as they are directly incorporated into musical works, as leading voices: there are birds, wolves and whales, obviously, but also less cuddly creatures, plants, cacti, rocks and stones. We also consider some of the motives and ideologies at work, and hear minerals make sounds that are hard to credit.
Lucía Egaña is an artist, writer, teacher, and anti-racist transfeminist activist. Lucía is a misfit researcher who for years has been implementing protocols designed to self-institute practices and spaces underpinned by a collective approach. Her methodology is undisciplined (or, as she says, subnormal), championing the bizarre, dirty, and marginal as a fertile testing ground for various relational, educational, and/or artistic devices. In this podcast we talk to Lucía Egaña about pedagogical processes, bibliographic dissent, wild writing, and the generative and affirmative potential of rage. We discuss identity politics, single-sex spaces, friendship as an engine for research, and the power of processes organised around informality and affects.
Cabello/Carceller is the artist duo Helena Cabello and Ana Carceller. Since the early nineties, they have been questioning the arbitrariness and restrictions imposed by gender divisions on our bodies, spaces, representations and behaviour. In this podcast Cabello/Carceller infiltrate the arts institution and show how queer voices are systematically excluded from spaces of power, as well as museums and collections. Through their work, they invite us to reconsider the spaces we live in and leave, in order to queer them and turn them into transitional, unproductive places – sometimes melancholy, sometimes liberating – from which to imagine and activate new kinds of existence. Together, we activate the political potentiality of bodies, affects, festivity and collectivity. But we also acknowledge the solitary revolt of discordant bodies who, by their mere presence, are already doing politics
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with artist, researcher and theorist Elaine Gan that we were unable to include the first time around.
A key figure in the field of live arts, Juan Domínguez describes himself as “a conceptual clown, magical cowboy, model-poet, and curator of pleasure.” His artistic body of work is situated both in and out of choreography, and champions excess as well as measure. In any case, he never loses sight of the question that guides his practice: “What shall we do together in this present moment to construct reality?”
We talk at length with Juan Domínguez about changing the parameters of live arts, putting a frame on reality, the complexities of participation and co-authorship, and Juan’s efforts to tense time and grow older with his projects and audiences. We also talk about his (admiring) envy of TV series, about robberies, about necessary and supporting co-conspirators, about the body and politics, and about discipline and chaos.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with sociologist, editor and writer César Rendueles that we were unable to include the first time around.
In this new PROBES Auxiliary by Chris Cutler, Beethoven is reorchestrated with power tools and a variety orchestra partners with canteen equipment while radios, gramophones and telephones explore their new vocation as performing instruments, and become the subjects of formal composition.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with the British sound artist and maker John Richards/Dirty Electronics that we were unable to include the first time around.
A grain of rice sits in a field on the banks of the Mekong river. A water buffalo breaks up soil in the Ifugao terraces in the Philippines. A black box containing rice seeds is placed on a shelf inside the Svalbard seed vault at -18°C in Norway. From such a common seed, hidden in plain sight, artist-scholar Elaine Gan weaves a dynamic network of relationships connecting agroecology and more-than-human sociability, subsistence farmers and climate change, contaminated taxonomies and feminist theory.In this podcast, Elaine Gan talks about crop science, feral technologies, the global pandemic, radical difference, the art of noticing, Matsutake mushrooms, and, of course, the blahblahsphere.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with sound artist Ji Youn Kang that we were unable to include the first time around.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with the slovak sound artist Jonáš Gruska that we were unable to include the first time around.
Hugo Esquinca’s work is a multi-layered crust, intentionally obfuscated through excess, deliberately hard to peel. Scraping off layers of obfuscation in this dense network of transductive interactions gets you nowhere, cause those layers are precisely what Hugo uses in order to expose you (and himself) to a sort of sensory overload. We discuss with Hugo how growing up in the hyperchaos of Mexico City relates to his fascination with speed, overabundance and syncretism.
When we chat to César Rendueles, the pages of his new book “Contra la igualdad de oportunidades. Un panflento igualirtarista” (Seix Barral, 2020) still smell of fresh ink. We talk about the myth of universal connectivity and technological dystopia. We touch on necropolitics, necroeconomics, and the importance of social ties in processes of social change. We go into museums, libraries, and schools to address the problems of public projects and the potential of egalitarian socialization and political imagination. We broach life and the market, work and care, health and business, meritocracy and privileges... to shed light on our shared fragility and our collective obligation to think about economics in a different way, accepting that we will never start from scratch.
Ji Youn Kang’s abstract compositions are infused with her personal blend of Western experimental sound and Korean ritual music. This hybrid background also seeps into her live performances, where she explores the primitive and empowering rhythmic structures of Korean shamanism –often building up from slow to fast– and noisy sound through an amalgam of handmade analogue devices, acoustic instruments, and digital signal processing techniques. In this podcast, Ji talks about Korean ritual music, perfect 5ths and nature, resonating objects, noise, self-built instruments, uncertainty and tension, Wave Field Synthesis, and strategies to engage online audiences in meaningful communication.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Reni Hofmüller that we were unable to include the first time around.
The improviser and maker John Richards describes the challenge of recording a performance-based practice and opens up his Dirty Electronics praxis through props and projects. He also tells us about the Luddites and Leicester, touches on his views on functionality, control, and safety nets, and talks about his approach to speculative circuitry, authorship and composition.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with sound artist Lars Holdhus that we were unable to include the first time around.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with political geographer and sound artist Anja Kanngieser that we were unable to include the first time around.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with political geographer and sound artist Anja Kanngieser that we were unable to include the first time around.
The slovak musician, sound artist, and maker Jonáš Gruska is a proud amateur, honouring the French origin of the term (to love what you do). Curiosity and passion run through pretty much everything that Gruska engages in. In our conversation ranging from his site-specific sound installations to his hand-crafted microphones and audio tools, his recent interest in mycology, and his playful exploration of the electromagnetic spectrum, Jonáš used the word 'fascination' quite a lot. We talk to Jonáš about resonating spaces, resonating surfaces, tramways, self-taught electronic circuitry, field recordings, fermentation, mushrooms, and unusual microphones.
in PROBES #28 Chris Cutler follows the incorporation into new works of saws, sandpaper and power tools, artisans and knitting machines – and goes on to investigate the repurposing of radios and gramophones as musical resources.
In the 1990s, twenty minutes was all it took for local authorities in the Austrian city of Graz to detect and neutralise any illegal radio transmitter. Back then, Reni Hofmüller was part of a group of activists who took over the airwaves with pirate broadcasts every Sunday from the mountains surrounding the city. After short 18-minute sessions, the Radio Dauerwelle team would pack up its equipment and clear out, moments before the authorities arrived. In this podcast, Hofmüller shares her early commitment with radio, as well as her obsession with dismantling the invisible in order to understand and question it. A trip through time that takes us from the 1980s to the present, through her personal involvement in feminist discussions from the perspective of new media. Our conversation is riddled with references to her commitment to open source, to doing things together, to the uninhibited mixing of disciplines, and to her passion for the electromagnetic sphere and bicycles.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with maverick composer Jennifer Walshe, that we were unable to include the first time around.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with the collective Laagencia, embodied here by the voices of Mariana Murcia, Diego García and Santiago Pinyol, that we were unable to include the first time around.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with choreographer and performer Alma Söderberg that we were unable to include the first time around. Alma discusses her influences, teachers and schools and two collective projects of different sorts: Manyone and John The Houseband.
In this episode typewriters invade every imaginable musical genre, while hoovers, bicycles, lightbulbs, foley work, the Eiffel tower and mail-franking are all conscripted into musical employment in quest of novel sonorities.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with video artist, activist and researcher Marina Gržinić, which we were unable to include the first time around. Marina reflects on her trajectory, together with Aina Šmid, in the field of video art and new media, from the eighties to the present day, from a feminist and socialist perspective.
Jennifer Walshe studied composition and often performs as a vocalist, but her practice and a whopping list of works over the past twenty years put her in a twilight zone where music, performance art, theatre and stage writing intersect and converge. Walshe’s approach to texts, scripts and musical scores is based on a recursive process, a kind of feedback loop which includes and acknowledges all sorts of information about the text itself – the context and paratext. In this podcast, we talk to Jennifer Walshe about writing, annotating, teaching, collecting, eavesdropping, performing, faking, and a touch of machine learning.
We dig up an unreleased fragment of our conversation with artist, educator and researcher Mônica Hoff, questioning the notion of creativity, that we were unable to include the first time around.
For the Columbian collective Laagencia, mediation and education are indistinguishable from artistic practice. Laagencia first opened its doors in 2010 in the Chapinero district of Bogotá, as an office for art projects with an exhibition space, run by Mariana Murcia, Diego García, Santiago Pinyol, Mónica Zamudio and Sebastián Cruz. Five years later it was rebooted as a collective thinking and study group open to methodological experimentation and informality, always looking for ways to organise new forms of “doing with others”. In this ensemble podcast, we talk with them about these ten years of "extitution"
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Efraín Foglia about the Xarxa de Ràdios Comunitàries de Barcelona (XRCB) that we were unable to include the first time around.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with finish artist Terike Haapoja that we were unable to include the first time around.
Political geographer and sound artist Anja Kanngieser works in the coordinates between space and sound. This merging of disciplines that seems completely normal to her tends to be more perplexing to the compartmentalised world of science and academia than to the undisciplined field of artistic practice. In this podcast, we become the listeners as Anja Kanngieser reflects on expanded listening, on the inaudible, and on our anthropocentrism. They talk about their long-standing interest in sound governance and dissect the many tensions that built up in the project “Climates of Listening”, which was originally based on the intention of amplifying campaigns for self-determination and self-representation in the Pacific.
Political geographer and sound artist Anja Kanngieser works in the coordinates between space and sound. This merging of disciplines that seems completely normal to her tends to be more perplexing to the compartmentalised world of science and academia than to the undisciplined field of artistic practice. In this podcast, we become the listeners as Anja Kanngieser reflects on expanded listening, on the inaudible, and on our anthropocentrism. They talk about their long-standing interest in sound governance and dissect the many tensions that built up in the project “Climates of Listening”, which was originally based on the intention of amplifying campaigns for self-determination and self-representation in the Pacific.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Ramon Amaro that we were unable to include the first time around. Ramon Amaro is a lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, London, and also in the Centre for Research Architecture. His work revolves around speculative articulations in machine learning, philosophies of being, mathematics, engineering, and black ontology.
In PROBES #27 Chris Cutler tracks the modern composer from the scrapyard to the office, then through the living room and into the kitchen in search of new musical resources - including scrap-metal, typewriters, vacuum cleaners, dot matrix printers, industrial quantities of paper, telephones, and the humble bean.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with New York artist and editor Susan Bee that we were unable to include the first time around.
Through a combination of artistic research, detective work, and an almost forensic approach to our own data trail, Joana Moll’s work exposes some of the most pressing issues of our data-driven, data-centric existence. Her research projects, talks, workshops and art pieces slip through the cracks of corporate behemoths to make sense of their polymorphic nature and reveal some of the hidden layers that shape and sustain the hypercapitalist fractal. In this podcast, we talk to Joana Moll about interfaces and their social implications, about technocolonialism, agency, surveillance, exploitation, speculation and, why not, about laughter.
The work of the sound artist Lars Holdhus, aka TCF, interrogates our relation to the technological infrastructures that permeate contemporaneity through language, code, cryptography and, most recently, ecology. En este podcast, Lars aboga por la presencia y la conciencia. Between tea sips, he reflects on toolmaking and impact, A.I. and the obsession with flesh, human time and machine time. He also points out how boring technology becomes when you are 70% Buddhist, while introducing us to his latest projects: a virtual touring software teasing the limits of the live music industry and a random processing tool that he feeds and confronts to compose and create images.
Alma Söderberg is a choreographer and performer who works with music and dance. As well as exploring close listening, Alma listens to rhythm and movement, in order to inhabit polyrythm and "simultaneous difference", to quote Eric Davis by way of Alma. In this podcast, Alma tells us about the many musical influences that inspire her choreographic practice: jazz, flamenco, hip hop, and experimental and Afro-American music. She also talks about multiplicity, reduced listening and deep listening, about letting rhythm run through you, about the voice, sharing, idiorhythms, Anni Albers, weaving, learning to wait, and about playing.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Isaac Julien that we were unable to include the first time around.
To the Argentinian trumpeter, percussionist, songwriter, and producer Tatiana Heuman, the world is a dance floor and and sound comes into being through close bodily combat involving intuition, movement, and hurdles. Thus, a paradox arises in the recording process, when spontaneity and corporality are reduced to mere beats on a timeline. In this podcast, Tatiana Heuman talks about music that runs through the body, about the intersections between dance and percussion, about sounds that move, about deconstructed folklore and babbling, about formal and informal teaching, about addition and subtraction, about names that don’t mean anything, and about the experiences of women who play and lug around drum kits.
This new episode of Roc Jiménez de Cisneros' OBJECTHOOD series features conversations with Diego Falconi, Rick Dolphijn, Dave Phillips, and music by Kali Malone. A spiral-shaped trip about fire, burning, ashes, rituals, cooking, food, and jungles. Though it is also about everything that lies in between and beneath each and every one of those things. The invisible micropolitics of food in the military; the symbolic charge of ashes, solid remains of an intangible object – fire – which has shaped this planet for millions of years; the untold gender-related motifs behind the Aimara genocide; a circular, cyclical perception of time; or the role and relevance of ecosystems, even beyond the good old wildlife cliché – because, you know, “everything is an ecosystem, at the end of the day”.
Finnish artist Terike Haapoja invites us to imagine this posthumanism: a hybrid, expansive, empathetic “we” with room for ambiguity and difference and for interspecies political understanding, in which the morbid fantasy of human exceptionalism and the hierarchy of species is put to rest once and for all. Drawing on concepts such as Syl Ko’s black veganism, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s expanded theory of animal rights, and Carol J. Adams’ sexual politics of meat, Terike Haapoja ventures to imagine a world beyond animalisation and distinctions between protected and disposable beings.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Fefa Vila that we were unable to include the first time around.
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Céline Gillain that we were unable to include the first time around.
We talk to Karo Moret, Diego Falconí and Lucía Piedra Galarraga interculturality, multiculturality, and migrant sit-ins. They share ideas on cosmopolitics, the Hispanic world, atavisms, and Afrofuturism; on El Cid's beard, the Royal Spanish Academy, and taking academia to the street. They examine the ways in which a transvestite theory of childhood challenges the imaginaries embodied in literature and explore the legal loopholes and the counter-routes of knowledge that could allow us, collectively, to come together in the south.
New York artist Susan Bee defends the political and subversive potential that develops when art and pleasure unite. Which is why imagination, poetry, humour, subjectivity, textures, colours, lines, and matter play an essential role in her work, both in her collages and paintings and her artist’s books. As an art student in the late sixties, she first came in contact with feminist activism and other social movements such as black power, gay rights, and protests against the Vietnam War. In 1986, she embarked on the project M/E/A/N/I/N/G, a self-managed art magazine that she co-edited with fellow artist Mira Schor for thirty years. In this podcast, Susan also shares the particularities of being a woman and an artist who has passed the age threshold of 65 in New York’s artistic ecosystem today.
Fefa Vila Nuñez is a queer feminist ‘artivist’, sociologist, mother, essayist, teacher, and many other things. Fefa was one of the founders of the lesbian collective LSD (1993-1998), which was, together with La Radical Gai, one of the touchstones of queer artivism in Spain in the 1990s. Through their political-artistic actions, LSD and La Radi defended new ways of understanding the body, sex, life, death, desire, friendship, family and work relationships, and political action. In this podcast, Fefa Vila reflects aloud on queerness as a state of radical estrangement, which is constantly being redefined. She also talks about the need to experience other forms of sociability, about other affective-relational models and about motherhood.
The work of Isaac Julien moves through liminal spaces. Overlapping zones between photography, film, and installation; choreography and dance; poetry and music… and the infinite possible versions, iterations, and variations that can emerge from systematic work with the archive. Intersections in which fiction, documentary, narrative, and radicality converge to produce aesthetically meticulous and politically powerful imaginaries and stories that challenge white heterosexual film conventions through their temporalities, narrative construction, and aesthetic forms. In this podcast, Isaac Julien talks about the need to give a voice and body to dissident black identity and desire in the cinematic imaginary, about expanded cinema and choreographic montage; and about his constant shifts between the worlds of art, video art, and film.
In these outtakes, Anton Kats talks about the transition from MAKU to MÆKUR, about slowing down and opening up listening spaces, and about contextual and emotional infrastructure in art practice.
Chris Cutler sends a snapshot of a variety of integrated musical incorporations of car horns, auto-parts, doorbells, scrap metal, asphalt, foghorns and power tools, in the worlds of rock, pop, contemporary music, jazz and film scores.
Process, liminality, mediation, transmission, radio, resonance, orality, archive, and abundance. In our coinciding and crossing of paths with Ukrainian artist, mediator, educator, and musician Anton Kats, “the stars aligned” to put prior learning and formats to the test. Three remote encounters, six hours of recording, and several red-hot scissors have produced this exquisite corpse in which we explore a discourse and practice that tend to spill over and exceed boundaries in both nuance and detail. In this podcast, we talk about the Europe of integration, about memory, dementia, and different ways of not knowing, about artistic research and art that defies representation, about site-specific projects and mobile, ephemeral devices, about narrowcasts and radio as a means of creating common public spaces.
Belgian artist and musician Céline Gillain split her time between working as a high school art teacher and the solitary practice of painting in her Brussels studio, until one day she had enough and organised a residency for six female artists at her grandmother’s house. Five years of collective experimentation with other women paved the way for the creation of hybrid, solo performances combining artistic research, the staging of her speculative writing, and catchy pop songs, carefully woven through complex and seemingly sooth and seamless narratives. We talk with Céline about her incursion into the music industry, stage fright, the power of fragility and depression as a form of resistance today. Paradoxically, her current media of choice are a mix of pop songs, motivational speeches, and updated fictions from the entertainment world, which run through everyday life in a darkly humorous, inimitable way.
We talk to Diego Falconí Travez, Lucía Piedra Galarraga and Karo Moret about slavery and love, the Caribbeanization of identities, and violence as a potential resource. They discuss affects, phobias, autophagies, and unsettling objects. And they examine the Latino world in relation to the mask of gay culture, coming out of the closet as a liberal promise, and resent(i)ment as a circular form that prevents memory from disappearing.
Professor Oyèrónké Oyèwùmi examines the ways in which universalism in academia distorts our understanding of African cultures, especially in relation to race and gender. In this podcast, Professor Oyèwùmi talks about age, seniority, and respect, about unscrupulousness and academia, dispossession and spirituality. She considers the oxymoron of the notion of “single mother” from the point of view of Yoruba culture, and she also notes how observance of community practices from non-Western cultures may be a necessary step as we face the planetary challenges to come.