Promise No Promises!

Does art education play a role in future forms of inequality? The core liberal values of freedom and equality are at work both in conceiving art education and in the role of women in the Western art-world system, but should we seriously reconsider their premises? Are the different art worlds correctly interpreting the impact of labor and the economic structures on the situation women face? How can a woman’s attention to sexuality and to the disparities of power that pervade in heterosexual relationships and in patriarchal cultures be amended? How can this go hand in hand with the radical need to reconsider the identification of sex-class membership that happens at birth and allow for the development of an individual’s personalities and preferences without the coercive influence of any socially-enacted value system? Crossing all these questions lies another: how are all these experiences of gender simultaneously informed by class, ethnicity, race…? Mainstream feminism has historically belittled the voices of women of color, queer women, women of different classes, disabled women, and the other non-normative identities that play a fundamental role in the experiences of women in the world. We are seeing the necessary resurgence of the term «intersectionality,» and the need to describe the ways in which oppressive institutions (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, xenophobia, classism, etc.) are interconnected and cannot be examined separately from one another. We know one thing: we must refrain from articulating one singular voice. We need a chorus!

The podcast series Promise No Promises! is an ongoing endeavor to address these issues. They originate from a series of symposia initiated in October of 2018 in Basel and moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer. Part of the Women’s Center for Gender and Equality, the symposia and the podcasts are the public side of this research project aimed to develop different teaching tools, materials and ideas to challenge the curricula, but also to create a sphere in which to meet, discuss, and foster a new imagination of what is still possible in our fields.

The episodes of the chapter The Tale and The Tongue, initiated in 2021, arise from conversations between curator and writer Sonia Fernández Pan and guests from different storytelling practices and world-making experiences. For a conversation to take place it is sufficient when two people to start talking to each other. However, conversations are never happening just between two people. A conversation holds many bodies, places, stories and experiences. It develops languages and creates interpersonal and temporary dialects. Sharing is also a way of collectivizing seemingly individual circumstances. Our bodies host many narratives, speaking borrowed words and making stories an important part of who we become. Stories travel between bodies, dwelling in them. Always in motion, they have no end. Words make worlds in which reality and its fictions travel through the tongue to become tales.

The chapter Feminisms in the Caribbean is a special collaboration with the Caribbean Art Initiative as part of the public program of the past exhibition One month after being known in that island supported by the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger. The Caribbean Art Initiative is committed to contemporary art that is related to the Caribbean and supporting the creative and cultural exchange between the Caribbean region and the rest of the world.

“In the last few years, I have seen Yuko in different places in Berlin, often in music-related environments but not only. Yuko Asanuma says, the places where we are willing to go to, we recognize each other as part of a different type of community. Although there may be music, it is something else that brings us together.

I attended the first Setten series of events, part of the agency Yuko Asanuma runs. ‘Setten’ is a Japanese word meaning both ‘point of contact’ and ‘common ground.’ It is also an invitation for people to meet and amplify each other. There is something slippery about partying, about being together in one place at one time. Even when all the elements seem to be perfect, we may not feel fully present. Other times, unexpectedly, we feel totally connected in places where we don't seem to belong. As Yuko states, you can't really anticipate the energy that an event will create.

While most of the institutional and mainstream cultural contexts are co-opted to remain silent, it is in other venues that the most relevant things and conversations are happening. And here I understand relevance as a question of common struggles and ethics in times of censorship and escalating state violence.”
Sonia Fernández Pan

“Dear Karolina,
The cuttings of the plants you gave me are taking root in water. I put them on a windowsill so that they are closer to the sun. It is quite telling that plants, which apparently don't move from their place, make you travel so much. But as you say, plants are not as native as they appear to be in many places. How a landscape can be a crime scene and a place full of concealed violence, to borrow your words, reminds me of how the forests of my childhood did not exist in my grandparents’ childhood...
This podcast also relates to this moment: a shared need to meet and talk. Especially, when many want us to be silent, detached, and indifferent….
A feminist collective called for the need to talk about trees, connecting many, many feminist struggles around the world. As they say, to talk about trees is to talk about colonialism, extractivism, and injustice...
I pause my words here, always curious to hear more stories from you.
Take care, and water.
Sonia”

Maya Saravia has lived in different cities since she left Guatemala, including Madrid, Lisbon, and Berlin. Even if we are the same person, our bodies do not move in the same way in all places and cultures. Part of the insights she and Sonia Fernández Pan share have a lot to do with feeling and thinking with other rhythms.

One of the music genres that Maya Saravia often talks about is raggaeton. The raggaeton rhythms are dangerously catchy. It is one of those music rhythms whose will is stronger than ours. In the statement of one of her projects, she refers to raggaeton as a syncretic event. It is a volcano erupting in the world, driven by the flows of capital, labour, many displacements, and musical traditions.

El Olvido, another of Maya Saravia’s projects, starts in a bar in Guatemala. She says it’s a bar that could be anywhere in the world. A place where the light-hearted life of bars mixes with the violence of the news. Violence always makes words fall short. Making things happen is usually the attitude of people who see art as a way, and not so much as a destination. It is not about the destination or following a course, but about how one thing leads to another; it is not only important to move, but to create conditions for movement. Perhaps that is the most magical thing about conversations, that they move us without intending to.

Dear Daniela,

I have been collecting bottle caps these days to keep bringing the sea closer to this marshy city. Yesterday I brought back several from a long journey to reach a lake, as well as some strange, very hard mushrooms growing on the trunks of some trees. Curiosity makes us eavesdrop and intrusive, diverts us from the straight and narrow, makes us perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary, even makes us change our minds. Do you think curiosity is a crossing point between seeking and finding? I feel it is an indispensable attitude to stay with the wonder, an idea of yours that is much more than an idea. It is perhaps a way of being in the world, an unstable position that makes and unmakes given realities. Someone told me that curiosity was a type of youth. And I think that if you stay with the wonder, you age youthfully.
In starting to write this letter, which is for you, but also for anyone who wants to listen to us through your voice, I was trying to recall things I said to you in my voice notes but not doing so keeps the secret. However, it is not the mystery of my stories that is important here, but the possibility of not telling something or of telling it half-heartedly. Not knowing everything stops being uncomfortable and becomes a way to stay with the wonder.
I stop here, a bit suddenly. A summer storm has just started. Perhaps these drops bring to Berlin the waters of so many rivers that are important to you. See you in the future to share flavors, wishes and stories. In the meantime, enjoy the unknown very much.  

Yours,
Sonia

Sonia Fernández Pan first met Tara Njála Ingvarsdóttir and Silfrun Una Guðlaugsdóttir on their way to LungA School in Seyðisfjörður, Island, where they were invited to lead two workshops. Seeing them being dressed alike, giving two different characters to the same piece of clothing, gave a glimpse to something that is very present in their work as artists: the way in which everyday life and art can become friends, thanks to playful gestures and storytelling stimuli.

Sonia Fernández Pan proposed them a little play: to tell her separately about a memory of their friendship. Tara Njála Ingvarsdóttir would tell the story of the little bugs, and Silla Una Guðlaugsdóttir would share past situations and present emotions that make friendship a living home. When asked about their reasons for studying art, both agreed that art is a space where it is possible to be various things at the same time. The artist becomes a shape shifter, a temporary identity, also the excuse for a story with many other characters. This way of doing things has enabled them to become waterproof gallerists, heads of a company providing apology support, emotional dinner party hosts, hairdressers for naughty hairstyles, or bird-shaped instrument players. Recently they got married in blue, celebrating their friendship and their constellating life together. The wedding included a contract in which they signed a piece of advice that someone gave them: to put friendship first. Their friendship wedding was officiated by the Icelandic Love Corporation, and sweetened by the world’s largest cake and intimate talks at night. Performance as an artistic device is a medium that not only allows them to include many other things, but also lets them play with the framework as themselves. Stories of friendship are important and inspiring for many reasons, not least because they also make friends out of stories.

Music would appear at the beginning of their conversation, sharing together impressions of music’s sensory ability to touch our emotions by bodily listening. The sensory dimension is something that music shares with artistic practices. However, there is a tendency to privilege its conceptual dimension, to locate art in the mind and not in the entire body.  
 
Being inspired by talking to other people is a kind of gift we receive, often without looking for it. In friendly conversations, ideas often come up that help us to shape or follow directions. They are part of a network that includes serendipities, spontaneity, and the pleasure in encountering each other. To borrow Teesa Bahana’s words, the possibility of creating a community involves a common language and knowing how to relate to each other across differences. Another common term in the art context is “professional.” It refers to a way of doing or not doing, but it is also an ideological subject with different, sometimes contradictory, perspectives. As Teesa Bahana points out, the critique of the term must take into account who is professional by default and who is not, who can ignore prescribed conventions and who cannot.  
 
The title of this podcast, You Never Know What You Are Creating Space For, is inspired by a comment from Teesa Bahana during the conversation that brings up unintentional yet essential situations when working: making space for the unexpected and paying attention to things that happen and we can sense without planning them.

A window that opens becomes a door. A door for a breath of fresh air and an internal change of scenery, as in my case. I kept listening to you, this time with the whole conversation in my ears, feeling two sources of light: that of sun and yours. I find it very telling that your name in Spanish means light. Barcelona’s nights have always been bright for me. And there are places where darkness goes beyond night, reaching into long summer days. As I also told you, snow and ice teach you that walking in a straight line can be very dangerous. You can be very clear about a direction to follow, but not about its path. Something like that happens to me with this letter I am writing to you after our spoken letters.  

We gave it a name: “moving a conversation.” And we came up with a little method: to move around spaces that were related to your projects. You in Barcelona, me in Berlin. I think we found a way to go back to the past by walking into the future.  

Thank you very much my dear, for moving me around, for taking me to so many places elsewhere, for making space for me among your words.” 

To critically and virtuosically address the world from mythic and counterhegemonic positions means to face colonial histories and neocolonial realities, as well as their denial of ancestral and speculative ways of perceiving and shaping that very world. The symposium Songs to Sound Worlds was devoted to artists and thinkers whose work addresses the importance of retelling and reinterpreting stories and myths that regard identity and gender with all their ecological and spectral entanglements intact. Such myths often transcend colonial binaries, offering life-generating languages that employ fiction and fantasy, poetry and song, which predate the systems imposed by hetero-modernity and its patriarchization of our most foundational stories.
The symposium was supported by SüdKulturfonds.

During her process of writing words often come before ideas. The writer’s body becomes a medium for the words, broadening a visceral relationship with language. One of the extraordinary qualities of words is that they cannot always explain themselves: they are content, but they are also form. They are result, but also process. Writing becomes something that happens and not just something writers do. It is a social, intimate, and responsive encounter with language that allows realities to appear within other realities. Writing can be an ethical tool and a compass in moments of disorientation. Moreover, “holding on to writing,” an expression of Kettly Mars during the conversation, can make it a way of life.

It was not until her thirties that Kettly Mars was able to devote herself fully to writing. Her previous work in administration brought her into contact with another kind of language very different from that of literature: the language of bureaucracy, which is also the language of institutional power. However, she was not so much influenced by this kind of language as by the people she met at the time. Kettly Mars, who has written extensively in French, also writes in Creole. While the two languages are part of her identity, her emotional relationship is not the same with each of them. This relationship also includes the socio-political context of Haiti over the years, during and after the Duvalier dictatorship. Different from history books, which are a collection of historical facts, names and events, novels and fiction add new meanings, add multiples senses and add everyday lives to official history.

After that class they started talking about body, pleasure, desire, and music; about electronic dance music as a kind of continuous orgasm with no beginning and no end, closer to the female logics of pleasure, and rock music, by contrast, being more like a male ejaculation with short, hurried songs. Julia Barrette-Laperrière talked about her project Falla, where she moves and is moved by a dildo in collaboration with the musician and guitarist Pia Achternkamp. One of the many motives behind it was to consider the guitar as an icon of masculinity, as a sort of sonorous phallus. The way in which gender takes over bodies, pleasure and music is very present in Falla. Here, Julia Barrette-Laperrière expresses and moves an alternative female sexuality, freeing it from so many inherited complexes.

This conversation with Julia Barrette-Laperrière “took screen” at the end of October 2022. Sonia Fernández Pan asked her about her archetype of the dangerous woman: for whom or for what can a woman be dangerous? Julia Barrette-Laperrière, who now expands this archetype beyond women, understands this dimension in the plural. Being dangerous, as a form of resistance, happens when people come together and ally themselves for a common cause. When Julia Barrette-Laperrière explains her personal and social relationship with femininity, her way of being a boy growing up reminds Sonia Fernández Pan of many other experiences she came across: she also feels part of the debate about gender pronouns, which simultaneously widen and tighten, and wonders if the rhythms of pleasure can be part of identities, making them strategic and non-essential for us to move in different ways.

The words “hi, how are you” came up a few times during their conversation, connecting to basic forms of hospitality and mutual care. This seemingly simple question is not always easy to answer. In some texts Sonia Fernández Pan read about Kosovo and Prishtina, the notion of hospitality was a constant. Era Qena would refer to an ancient book where hospitality already appears as a set of rules and principles. Far from written or spoken rules, conversations and shared stories are a place where hospitality can also happen.

The conversation for this podcast episode took place in October 2022. Era Qena and Sonia Fernández Pan started talking about the difficulty of owning your own place when you are very young. Half of Kosovo’s population is under thirty years old. In addition there are the severe limitations imposed by the EU on Kosovars, who need a visa to travel to other states. This reconnects with imbalances in hospitality: when it happens on the one side but not on the other. The conversation however led also to other directions: to private spaces with public uses, to Termokiss and its influence on other projects and social structures, to taking care of street dogs, to relationships in digital times, to the many lives that appear in one’s own... the question “how are you” is both a personal and collective one. 

For her the intensity and fragmentary intimacy of many relationships happen during intense work processes, where she collaborates with many other people who also shape her projects. To find each other is a way to find oneself. Being in relationships allows us to perceive that which remains and that which wanders along the way.

Sylbee Kim’s projects radiate a strong interest in life and body consciousness, both social and individual at the same time. Watching Sylbee Kim’s videos, conversations or ideas resonate, that come up recurrently when talking to others: a certain mythological self-expression of capitalism, the confusion between spirituality and religion, the Western tendency to scepticism, the moral superiority of secular and scientific knowledge, socially scripted feelings… In her projects, videos are elements that are part of a larger whole: an environment or an aesthetic ecosystem. Several objects, colors, lights, different intensities of space and sound are equally important in providing an experience for the viewer, who becomes a temporary inhabitant of a temporary setting.

The conversation with Sylbee Kim took place in Berlin in July 2022. She refers to Berlin as a locus of affection. Having grown up mainly in Seoul, passing through other places, and having come to Germany during her student years, her place of belonging is not a specific place, but a constant situation of feeling “in between.” Her words on belongingness remind that to feel at home we need certain places but that we can also feel at home being with certain people. Again, finding each other can be a way for finding oneself.

The contributions to the symposium, moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer, were devoted to discussing Indigenous thought, decolonial feminisms, and the political possibilities of the mythic imagination, raising questions like: How do Indigenous cosmologies create forms for resistance? How does the Western imaginary of the Amazon, from its roots in racial capitalism to its corporate-tech, paternalistic present, cloud our understanding of how its peoples and nonhuman spirits narrate themselves?  

Since the long sixteenth century, the organization of the world has found its hegemonic form in hierarchies of power and possession, between those who exploit and expropriate and those who are exploited and whose lives and lands and resources are expropriated. This is not the past, nor a function of ideology only. If the projected supremacy of one form of life over all others is only made possible by manifold forms of violence, one of these forms remains the invention (and constant reinvention) of nature by colonial cultures. This invention rests on an idea of progress in which nature is construed as what one emerges from. Indigenous ancestral epistemologies hold a different understanding of the real, though. “The land owns us,” Aboriginal Australians might say.  

Laure Prouvost’s answer to the question about who she would like to be if she wasn’t herself was “a bird”, commenting on this animal’s ability to fly. Sonia Fernández Pan added that she would like to be a cat, perhaps because one of its great talents is the daily right to laziness in a world where life works relentlessly. They ended the conversation by returning to their animal relationship as bird and cat, with Laure Prouvost flirting with the possibility that one catches and eats the other.  

In the many biographies that Laure Prouvost has written about herself, she strays from traditional artist biographies, describing her work according to the narrative and experiential drive of her projects and her way of naming them to ones where the institutional curriculum is replaced by a list of situations that her projects were able to create: Melting Into Another, an Occupied Paradise, Deep See Blue Surrounding You, a Waiting Room with objects, a New Museum for Grand Dad, A tearoom for Grand Ma, a lobby for love among the artists… Within these places we are no longer an impersonal audience, but characters who enter temporal worlds where fiction becomes materially present and real. 

The difference between fiction and lying is a question Sonia Fernández Pan also shared with Laure Prouvost, inspired by how she never fully reveals in her work what is fiction and what is not. The storytelling surrounding is another element of her artistic practice, strategically confusing spheres that the traditional art system insists on keeping apart. 

The conversation with Laure Prouvost took place in April 2022 in separate locations. Sonia Fernández Pan was listening to Laure Prouvost’s words from the computer and paying attention to the sound of the strokes of a drawing that the artist brought into their meeting. There are many similarities between writing and drawing. Both arise from the body, both produce a physical and intimate relationship between head and hands. The strokes of Laure Prouvost’s drawing added sound textures to her words—the podcast episode Birds and cats invites you to listen to her voice and strokes. 

As Marily Gallardo says in an interview with Dominican journalist Patricia Solano, it is fundamental to recognize the body as the first territory, as the most important place to construct the experience of life. This is because the body is also a denied territory, inhabited by social disciplines, above all for women. Marily Gallardo’s work is a constant affirmation practice of the body, individual, collective and communitarian at the same time. Her body and all the bodies she carries become present in her words through the polyrhythm and energy they radiate, making her writing also dance, brimming with movements and gestures.  

The culture of black communities is the matrix of Dominican identity. However, as Marily says, the importance and relevance of Afro-Dominican dance is still absent in many official dance studies, including that of the national dance school. Recognizing the techniques and the organised systems of Afro-Dominican dance to place it in official curricula is also part of her work as a choreographer and teacher. Kalalú dance school started its activity more than two decades ago. Emerging from the need to bring back the experience of creativity and reflection on Dominican culture, their collective work reinforces Afro-Caribbean ways of doing, both in their insular and peninsular territories. 

This podcast episode with Marily Gallardo is the result of a process of several months in collaboration with other people. The words that she writes in Spanish have been translated into English by Albertine Kopp and read by Yina Jiménez Suriel. How her body becomes feeling is something that Marily shares through her writing, in one of the texts she sent to Sonia Fernández Pan. The word “feeling” appears in bold. Words vibrate in Marily’s texts and hands, full of dance, celebrating the collective struggle of black women. Their resistance is a political movement in which pleasure, memory and the shared power of dance are flowing towards the future.

This statement also connects with the idea of “the voice is the body of words,” she further explains that words are almost empty. Like bodies, words do not exist by themselves either: they are in relation, they take on meaning in context. Language is felt in a body that feels with language.

Itziar Okariz speaks Basque, Spanish and English. There is an intimate relationship between language and identity. We are different depending on the language we use. Even the tone of our voice changes. Language is a mirror without a fixed image. In Itziar Okariz’s work, language is like water that spills and holds at the same time, taking space. Her artistic practice is influenced by sculpture, a fundamental practice in the Basque context. Her actions and performances bear witness of how bodies not only take space, but how social space takes our bodies. Art critic Miren Jaio described Itziar Okariz’s approach to the body as a way of working with what is at hand, music, hair, gesture and repetition, the traditional Basque cry of Irrintzi, echo, breath, yoga, light, language and the disappearance of text... even dreams.

This conversation between Itziar Okariz and Sonia Fernández Pan took place on the last day of January 2022. Itziar was in Bilbao and Sonia was in Barcelona. They were both accompanied by the same image: the transcription of one of Itziar’s dreams. Itziar turns them into short paragraphs. She makes us linger over the same sentence, which is never the same sentence. She gives rhythm to her dreams, literally, she turns them into sound matter. Dreams are very intimate experiences in which others are present and absent at the same time. Dreams are similar to art actions: there are people who are part of them without ever being aware of it.

Years later, in Barcelona, as the social and economic crisis deepened in 2008, she began to question more strongly the contribution of graphic design to social and political change and relocated to London to study for an MA in Design Writing Criticism. It was then that she wrote her thesis on Hacking as critical and collective practice in design. Inspired by the Spanish protests of the 15M-movement in 2011, she would return to Barcelona to continue and expand her relationship with different cultural scenes in the city.  

Katharina Hetzeneder and Sonia Fernández Pan, the maker of the The Tale and The Tongue series, know each other from working together. Their closeness didn't just come from working together, but also from belonging to related scenes and having common friends and world-making desires. For Katharina it is essential to know the projects she is involved in from the very beginning. She also points out how exciting it is to be part of the moment when an idea begins to take shape, full of desire but with no clear purpose yet. Katharina and Sonia agree that it is very important to work with people and content that share common ethics with them.  

To script the conversation, Katharina shared impressions, memories, desires and life experiences with Sonia by email. Katharina highlighted the difference between working collectively and working with collectives; the work on and with archives; the importance of writing in her processes; the interest in scenes as an interest in the people who form part of them; the omnipresent but ephemeral character of graphic design in the digital age... Although graphic design was a compass during the conversation, Katharina and Sonia decided to talk about the notion of home and the influence of the rural—a reality they both know first-hand—and relationship with and in urban environments.   

The conversation with Katharina took place on 30 December 2021. She was in Berlin, having just returned from spending a few days at her hometown Lambrechten in Austria. Sonia was in Barcelona, having also just returned from the small town where she grew up in Galicia. For many people the year ends by returning to the past, just before they start to flirt with expectations and promises from the recent future. It happens every year, a strange and familiar feeling of both temporal circularity and linearity at the same time. Growing and moving horizontally is an idea that Katharina shared during the encounter, recalling Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of the radicant. Roots are not a place but trajectories or pathways. People are home, Katharina would also say. This podcast episode is both, a spell for ending and beginning another year. It is sustained by a desire for conversation, between people but also within collective events larger than our individualities.    

Thereby she includes excerpts from Becoming Public Among Ourselves (2018), her own text on the artist’s work.

The Episode is part of the series Going to the Limits of Your Longing, Research as Another Name for Care, a collection of episodes emerged from the  → Master Symposium held in spring 2021 at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW in Basel. The contributions to the symposium were devoted to ideas and forms of artistic research that center art as a practice in service of the social. They revisit certain moments in our recent history and present of researching, producing, and exhibiting art in the name of such beliefs, namely social justice.

Via the photo-based collage work The Glass of Petrol by artist Agnieszka Polska, Maria Lind talks about the macro- and microlevel of climate change and the agency of art in relation to a revitalized and accelerated understanding of the art’s own relevance and its imaginative and projective qualities.

The episode Worldmaking is part of the series Going to the Limits of Your Longing, Research as Another Name for Care, a collection of podcast episodes emerged from the  → Master Symposium held in spring 2021 at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW in Basel. The contributions to the symposium were devoted to ideas and forms of artistic research that center art as a practice in service of the social. They revisit certain moments in our recent history and present of researching, producing, and exhibiting art in the name of such beliefs, namely social justice.

In this episode, as a memento to Marion von Osten whose engagement, curiosity and energy generated communities of people and things that resonated with one another in unexpected ways, Filipa Ramos shares the story of Jeanne Villepreux-Power, a naturalist who invented in 1832 the first recognizable glass aquarium to aid her observations.

The episode Curiosity is part of the series Going to the Limits of Your Longing, Research as Another Name for Care, a collection of podcast episodes emerged from the  → Master Symposium held in spring 2021 at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW in Basel. The contributions to the symposium were devoted to ideas and forms of artistic research that center art as a practice in service of the social. They revisit certain moments in our recent history and present of researching, producing, and exhibiting art in the name of such beliefs, namely social justice.

She uses the notion of “land” as a geological and discursive formation, often taking as her starting point the systems and procedures by which raw materials are locally dug up, technologically processed and globally circulated. From there she follows the threads that intertwine ores, material culture and the construction of desire with the redistribution of power and knowledge.

The episode Care is part of the series Going to the Limits of Your Longing, Research as Another Name for Care, a collection of podcast episodes emerged from the → Master Symposium held in spring 2021 at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW in Basel. The contributions to the symposium were devoted to ideas and forms of artistic research that center art as a practice in service of the social. They revisit certain moments in our recent history and present of researching, producing, and exhibiting art in the name of such beliefs, namely social justice.

This multiplicity of terms, which refer both to practices in process and to established roles, also indicates an overflow in words.  A word that would be important to add to this list is the notion of «in-betweenness»: the ability to be in two places at the same time but without being fully in either one of them.
Ericka’s project Un hechizo en el espacio [A spell in the space] gave the opportunity to start in a concrete and very important place for her: the city of Cali in Colombia, where several artists worked on what she defines as «un terror de tierra caliente» [hot-earth terror]. The reality of Cali, marked by a subtle and persistent fatality, makes light converge with gloom within its mythologies and practices of excess. As Ericka herself writes in a text with visual shines and shadows, in Cali «there is something that is about to arrive but never arrives». There is a suspension of expectations and social promises which is joined by the suspension of time during the exuberant hours of dancing and partying. In her danceable lecture Sobredosis de amor [Love Overdose], Ericka Florez analyses the narrative structure of «salsa rosa» and its links with drug dealing. The logic of self-destructive excess is also present in the music, where the political strength of classic salsa rhythms is softened by the love lyrics of salsa rosa songs.

Dancing stayed with us during our conversation, being defined by Ericka as «radical listening». Independent of the types of music that provoke the movement of bodies in so many places in the world, bodies that dance are always bodies that listen in a radical way. They listen from pleasure, from collective energies, from constituent materiality and beyond language. But the body is not only a vessel for dance, it is also a medium that often allows us to understand the rational better than language. As it is also a medium to listen to the environment and to keep moving after times and moments of loss and disorientation. Once again borrowing Ericka's words, «when one feels lost in the sound and doesn't know how to move, it is the collective body that sustains us».

"Living creatures of fiction" is Giovanna Rivero's name for what many call characters. But characters are much more than characters: not only for those who create them, but also for those who meet them through reading. Another term Giovanna uses is " incarnations ", appealing to their corporeal and material dimension. The subjectivities that exist in fiction have as many bodies as there are readers who feel and embody them. Many genres flow intensely and rapidly through her novel at the same time: science fiction, detective fiction, fantasy... And of course, reality. All of them inhabit a story made up of many stories that do not follow a predictable sequence. The hybrid worlds of Tukzon are part of unusual and extraordinary realities of the world we live in. They are also the result of her first encounter with the United States, a cultural context very different from her place of origin, Bolivia.

When asking how the Bolivian reality appears and becomes present in her stories, Giovanna once again gives prominence to characters. Bolivia is an energy, also an aura, which flows through her characters, which makes them be and acting in a specific way. They are beings that are never closed, that ask to be expanded by each reader, intentionally saturated with culture and space. Her latest book of short stories, Tierra fresca de su tumba, in each of the stories the body is present in many ways. Not only do the characters remind us again and again of the materiality of the human body, but the environments they inhabit also reveal its strong material condition. Body appears from flesh, as an uncontrollable, mutating territory that can also betray us. This sensitivity to the environment is very present in Giovanna Rivero's thinking, whose ethic calls for the importance of all lives, human and non-human, as part of a whole on and off planet Earth.

“Dear Sara,

I am writing you this letter to you because for me the epistolary genre is deeply related to friendship and love. A friend of mine once told me some time ago that together we would be like 19th century lovers, writing long and intense emails to each other. At first our correspondence was shaped by a geographical distance and later became influenced by another distance, one produced by the difficulty of seeing each other frequently while living in the same city. Now we write short messages to each other. The practice of epistolary love requires a time that we both no longer have, but our concise words and our relative silences are equally loving. I suppose I find it difficult to speak of love in the third person, following Marguerite Duras's critique of her friend Roland Barthes after his unloving discourse on love.

In one of your texts, Friendship as a way of life: a culture of the lovers-friends, you begin by mentioning Michel Foucault and his conception of friendship as the center of queer becoming and relationships. What kind of relationships can exist outside the framework of the heterosexual norm? This is a question that you also ask yourself, too. And that you surely also answer from out of a certain practice and not only from a theoretical point of view. The norms of love make us love from within the norms. And I feel that love from within the norms can dangerously lead to love of the norms. I got to know your concept of the ethics of the lovers-friends thanks to an online reading in which I heard you speak for the first time.  It was months ago, in the first winter of the pandemic, when the feeling of having lost so many indispensable worlds was very strong. To meet you and the lovers-friends was really hopeful by then. With this concept you refer to a third space of relationship based on the encounter and practice of love. Could we say that it is a formless form of love? I misunderstood it then, mentioning to you my inability, perhaps frustration, to be more physically intimate with my friends. As you told me yourself, the lovers-friends ethic is not about having sex with friends, but about understanding that our lovers are our friends and vice versa, and that this ethic is a culture of resistance. It is a third space in a binary world. But betting on this ethic, as you always point out, also has painful consequences. The fact that relationships cannot be readable produces suffering and discomfort. As you say, if it is not monogamous and unconditional, it is not real love. If there is no renunciation and sacrifice, it is not real love. The realities of love should be more realistic… and friendly.

I find it very important and inspiring how you include ethics in love. I think that ethics is not compatible with roles and with the unconditional narrative of love, because it puts special attention on behaviors and practices. You also include an element that is as powerful as it is slippery in the practices of love: desire. Desire points to a relationship, to forms of contact. It is also a name for what does not yet have a name. Likewise, it is something capable of flowing into writing, your writing, making the lesbian text emerge. Desire, like the poetic gesture you mention in our conversation, is related to the mysterious. And here I remember another interview you gave, where you questioned the concept of the writer through which you were defined at the beginning. You asked: When do you become a writer? How much do you have to write to be a writer? The writer, like the artist or the curator, has ended up becoming a role, a form of absent content. Sometimes it surprises me that we are so critical of so many identity roles but so uncritical of professional roles. But I don't want to take up more space by talking to you here and I bid you a friendly farewell until the next time we meet.

Thank you very much for all the words and time you shared with me.”

Moreover, her work both produces and is produced by modes of relation and affection through film processes, altering and expanding the narrative structures of cinema and making them more visible to the audience. In Alex Reynolds' films, viewers get invited to enter into stories and situations in a similar way to being invited to play a new game. Many of her films take place on the screen; others are events that cannot be fully seen from the outside because they include the spectator's view by their very presence in the place.  Alex’ s projects show that cinema is much more than moving image but instead is a life in motion. At this point the difference between ethics and morality is a distinction making visible the unspoken scripts and narratives that also structure the public sphere of art and culture. The Camera that Listens brings up the gazes that filming can make possible, the gazes that inspired her to make films and thus somehow continue the gestures, rhythms and sensorial visuality of other filmmakers.

After completing her degree in Drama and Theater Studies, Justyna Stasiowska is a PhD student at the Performance Studies Department at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. In addition to her theoretical work, contributing to diverse media on theatre and contemporary music, she also collaborates as sound designer with various choreographers. With "Expertise is the new genius" Justyna encapsulates in a few words a cultural narrative strongly rooted in contemporary music. This narrative gives special relevance to the mastery of technology by musicians, who know their own instruments like no one else does, after years of difficult and painstaking never-ending learning. One keeps feeding the narrative of expertise that, at the same time, offers resistance to being fully achieved. Moreover, the notion of expertise also resonates with a monogamous relationship to sound, in which each musician is the connoisseur, protector and keeper of a very specific type of music that distinguishes them from each other. The cultural logic of specialized expertise means, that, by contrast, a preference for eclecticism is perceived as not very serious, as recreation or as a weak commitment to musical learning.

There are further narratives arising from the patriarchal gaze that are assumed as norm in the field of music. Not only logics of progress and development, of improvement and advancement, are part of the history of sound. Also, the popular use of military concepts applied to the context of sound is very common, especially in the description of albums, songs or concerts. The genealogy of this language goes unnoticed, turning the musician into a sonic warrior. In her sophisticated perception of language, Justyna's definition of noise is not so much about sound as sonic matter per se, but about contextual perception and possible shifts in meaning. This conversation began with the relationship between sound and theatre, questioning the priority of the eye in what happens on stage and in the stalls, and ended by talking about a different kind of relationship to language through dyslexia and its resistance to normative learning sequences. Many other things came in between, including the desire to listen to music producers speak of intuition and the pleasures of the still unidentified.

 Whose body, though, and what kind of movement? Movement, indeed, is always both, suggesting something singular—a body in tender, private effort—and something collective.

Presence, proximity, voice, movement, and performative relations are the tools by which many contemporary artists, in unprecedented ways, continue to explore how to create equitable space for our ever-regulated, dully delimited bodies. This symposium served those practices, examining how performance has become the means by which so many artists and thinkers reflect on and denounce political systems that foster inequity, violence, and binary relations at their core.

Various guests made this set of relations explicit —between singularity and collectivity, authenticity and performativity, a language of narrativity both visual and linguistic, movement both physical and intellectual. The complicated desire to perform for others and with others, and to read such performances, was a recurring idea and impulse of the Womxn in Motion symposium, as it continued with performances, conversations, screenings, and readings by artists, thinkers, poets, filmmakers, composers, and teachers—performers—including Kat Anderson, Julieta Aranda, Barbara Casavecchia, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Pan Daijing, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Ingela Ihrman, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Bhanu Kapil, Lynne Kouassi, Isabel Lewis, Tessa Mars, Sonia Fernández Pan, Sadie Plant, and Martina-Sofie Wildberger.

In the first of six episodes based on the symposium Womxn in Motion, Basel-based artist Lynne Kouassi is in conversation with Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer. Her works explore the excluding effects of structural dominance and other normative orders, as well as the historical and social conditions that shape the relationship between body, gender, knowledge, and power. Lynne Kouassi’s practice also addresses strategies for escaping control and questions of migration.

Author of the poetry book Collective Amnesia (2017) and the play No Easter Sunday for Queers (2017), she is founder and director of Manyano Media, a multidisciplinary project that produces and supports the work and stories of black queer artists and queer life.

The conversation between Koleka Putuma, in Cape Town, and Sonia Fernández Pan, in Berlin, took place at the end of January 2021. They talked a lot about poetry, as a practice, as part of Koleka Putuma’s early biography and as a working context.

The pandemic appeared also from the social impact and political power that language holds. As we know, the very nature of a virus includes as part of its evolutionary process continuous transformations over time. The fact that these new mutations appear in specific regions of this planet should not add national labels to them. They produce ideological implications and spread accumulated prejudices. And yet the media and many governments insist on referring territorially to processes that are beyond national identities. Structural violence against womxn and femicides are a pandemic long before the one produced by Covid-19. At the present time, not only do these two pandemics coexist structurally, but the current situation generally intensifies violence against women. Every Three Hours (2019) is a poem by Koleka Putuma that refers to the murder rate of womxn in South Africa and the insufficient state and social support to end this pervasive violence. In a world that depicts so many forms of violence in graphs and statistics, poetry and words are able to speak of what numbers do not count and do not tell.

Her voice appeared earlier in several episodes of the Phenomenal Ocean: Corona Under the Ocean 2020 podcast series. Astrida Neimanis, Filipa Ramos or Elizabeth Povinelli mentioned her work in the different conversations from the ocean and towards the waters.

In the Wake is a book Sonia Fernández Pan started to read in other people’s voices but that does not let itself be translated into other people’s words. It has its own different grammar that reveals and recounts grammar as a form of power. It’s an essay written in first person that tells the history and present of the black diaspora, the structural and constitutive anti-blackness of white colonialism and capitalism.

During the conversation, Christina Sharpe emphasized that the use of the first person and her own biography when writing In the Wake is not intended to speak of her individual experience as exceptional, but rather as an exercise in openness towards the historical and structural dimension of the book. Black suffering, also black resistance, must be contextualized in the long history of structural anti-blackness. She also tells how some people have considered In the Wake as a book about Black Death when it is also a book about Black Life, about forms of collective resistance within a constantly hostile climate. “I am interested in the ways we live in and despite that terror,” she says. Being “in the wake” also implies the existence and possibility of “wake work”.

The conversation with Christina Sharpe took place at the end of December 2020. She was in Toronto and Sonia Fernández Pan was in Berlin. They began talking about the sea and water and how Christina Sharpe’s thinking is a thinking with water and with authors who think with water. It is also a form of tidal thinking, where her voice carries many other voices and works in an explicit and non-linear way. Although speaking and writing can produce very different languages from each other, Christina Sharpe's way of speaking contains her writing and vice versa. In the conversation, not only do other voices appear within her own, but the writing itself becomes voice thanks to the organic becoming of talking into reading aloud. When writing is inscribed in bodies, they remind us that thinking is also visceral and material.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is aware of the camera as an experiential device and aesthetic instrument that expands the perception of the human eye and psyche, and a carrier and producer of ideology. Various types of gaze converge in it: the male gaze, the white gaze, the military gaze, the human gaze... This is why her practice means thinking with places, with their differences and particularities, in order not to reproduce the same human and historical logic, for example, like the notion of the exotic, a mindset supported by the tourism industry, constantly reproducing Western colonial imaginaries.

Thinking with places, in the plural, is a way of accounting for the diversity of environments. It is also a way of overcoming the misleading binary division between the local and the universal. The material dimension of thinking not only refers to using a body to think, but to practice the thinking through objects. They are invisible agents within the history of thought and at the same time systems of interactions in constant transformation. The enormous production of images of our present makes us think that everything has been represented, that everything is visible. This is not true. What has been over-represented is a partial way of understanding reality, not realities themselves. Therefore, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz proposes the possibility of creating images without spectators or even a cinema without an audience. Working from the margins of representation produces a marginal territory that questions the natural assumption of a center.

On her Twitter account she introduces herself as follows: “Mother, Gitana, Mestiza, Feminist. Worker in my home. In the ghetto I discovered my Roma identity, outside the ghetto I discovered anti-Roma harassment”. The conversation was translated by Ainhoa Nadia Douhaibi Arrazola, a social educator and co-author of the book The Radicalization of Racism. Islamophobia and the Prevention of Terrorism (2019).

The rules imposed during the confinement have at no point taken into account the particularities and vital needs of many idiosyncrasies and individuals. In the case of the Roma people, restrictions on their traditional professions, itinerant trade, open-air markets and artistic creation have left many without work, income, and food. And it is seriously affecting the economic freedom of Romany women. The lack of political support and understanding has led to the creation of different networks between platforms and members of the Roma community. Silvia Agüero Fernández writes in one of her articles published in Pikara Magazine: “The Roma insurrection is the ultimate resistance to the established system, it is my alternative to a world, to a system of thought, economy and society that others have established”.

Together with Nicolás Jiménez Gonzalez, Silvia Agüero Fernández runs the project Pretendemos Gitanizar el Mundo, a valuable archive in process where they create and share a counter-narrative to fight structural and cultural anti-gitanismo. As a specific form of racism against Roma, anti-gitanismo is not only condoned but also trivialized. Their project proposes an in-depth study through numerous articles of scientific, historical and cultural popularization, while also providing support for institutions and associations that want to fight against anti-Roma harassments.

In the particular case of Romany women, anti-gitanismo is merged with structural patriarchy. As Silvia Agüero Fernández tells, feminism has always existed among Romany women. It is born and lived in the kitchens of homes and within families. It is a box of tools, values and struggles that are transmitted from women to women through emotional proximity and by ways of living together. The leader’s narrative, omnipresent in feminism, creates a herstory that makes invisible the work and daily forms of resistance of so many women throughout history. Within those forms there has been the feminism of Romany women for centuries, which is an ongoing collective anti-racist and anti-capitalist resistance.

 This first-person anthology of essays of seventeen Muslim women's stories gives rise to a collective voice where differences are as important as similarities in creating a community of their own within the spectrum of feminism and world-making. Reading this book is like being anonymously invited to meet another community of feminists. But not in order to talk to or discuss with them, but mainly to listen and to unlearn. One way of presenting It's not about the Burqa is the final statement by its editor, Mariam Khan, in the introduction: “We are not asking for permission anymore. We are taking up space. We’ve listened to a lot of people talking about who Muslim women are without actually hearing Muslim women. So now, we are speaking. And now, it's your turn to listen.”

As Mariam Khan herself says, seventeen texts are only seventeen voices within the myriad of ways Muslim women think and act around the world. When feminism is concerned only with a few women, then it ceases to be liberating and becomes a tool of oppression for a large number of women. One of the many clichés that Mariam Khan and all the authors of the book dismantle is the moral superiority of the secular West over religious cultures. Islam as a religion that empowers women is a constant affirmation in the book, which the authors demonstrate with historical facts and practices.

The conversation with Mariam Khan took place at the end of October 2020. She was in London and Sonia Fernández Pan in Berlin. With the arrival of autumn and the glaring increase of infections and deaths, most European governments have imposed a second lockdown. The state of vigilance and mutual accountability that has emerged during the pandemic is however not new to Muslim women in Western Societies. The Western Gaze is a form of violence that police their bodies and exoticizes them, misrepresenting Muslim women as submissive and equal to each other whereas the reality is very much different. Now that we all have to wear a mask in public for reasons of health and mutual care, a necessary question that reappears is: Why are some reasons more legitimate than others to cover or uncover faces or bodies? It's not about the Burqa is a book that brings up the present and past of Muslim women in the British context, but also their future. The fight for women’s right is to fight for all women’s right and all their different communities. Making it real may be complicated, but understanding it is the first step that has to be taken.

Somehow, reading books starts always in reverse. We turn them over with our hands, looking for answers in advance on the back cover. However, Reverse Cowgirl is not a book made to satisfy questions, not even those of the author herself regarding her own biography. The conversation with McKenzie Wark does not provide a continuation of her book. It actually starts with her reflections on Marx. Her critique of capitalism is at the same time a critique of the concepts that the critique of capitalism itself constantly produces. What kind of economy produces information that is turned into a commodity?

How can we call the system we live in, which in fact parasites our bodies individually and collectively in order to expand and to survive? The struggles in which many concepts and many anonymous bodies are involved in are extremely important. When we think about the concept of Feminism, it becomes violent and discriminatory when there is no recognition of the enormous differences between bodies and the lives lived by those bodies. Feminism, if not perceived as intersectional, is in danger of producing oppressive and exclusionary paradigms. Capitalism needs our bodies to be healthy and functioning in order to be able to continue working for it, but it does not offer the same support to all people. Race, class and gender are some of the many elements to consider when we think about health. However, it’s also true that past struggles for better and more accessible health systems provide experiences and strategies from which we can learn in the present. The rather pessimistic spirit in thinking about the future was nevertheless accompanied by a certain festive spirit thanks to the emergence of nightlife and dance culture during our conversation. The genealogy, bodies and culture that techno music produces are different from those of other music realities. In fact, each type of music shows that there is not one homogenous dance community, but many communities made up of different bodies and experiences. The same applies to Feminism. We should never forget that there is always more than one community and that communities exist in continuous transformation and differences.

As a way of overcoming the divisive effects of identitarianism, they propose “to enact an intersectional affinity-based politics.” In order to avoid the dynamics of the current “cancel culture,” so present and constant in social networks, Lou Drago’s proposal is based on calling-in rather than calling-out. This conversation between Lou Drago and Sonia Fernández Pan navigates through issues and situations such as the binary understanding of reality, gender abolitionism, the naturalized and somehow hidden ideology of language, xeno-feminist desires, queer as a methodology and constant practice of unlearning, different personal experiences produced by Covid-19, and the different political events of the last weeks as a result of the forms of violence caused by structural racism.

“The first conversation I had about Covid-19 with the artist Ran Zhang took place in Paris at the end of January 2020, on the occasion of her exhibition Resolution of Traits at the independent art space L'ahah. The virus that had caused a new disease, first in Wuhan and China, was now appearing in France and by then no longer an alien entity but instead becoming a European reality. Despite the many speculations we shared in Paris, neither Ran nor I imagined that the outcome would be a global pandemic and confinement. But already then, we felt the awakening of Western prejudices about the Chinese community. The second conversation with Ran took place in April 2020 in Berlin during two different moments. She was staying at home in her room in Neukölln and I was staying in mine in Kreuzberg, connected within the digital-turn of human relations at a time when contact between bodies is forbidden-but-not-forgotten and when time seems to have stopped to move forward more quickly. This conversation with Ran is an attempt to approach the current situation from her personal experience, from her situated knowledge and from her enormous and sparkling ability for story-telling: Viruses, molecular structures, prejudices, feminist prejudices, food markets, factories, systems of work, care and affection, the couple and the coupledom, confinement, hyper-productivity, turnings and turnouts shaped this in-between conversation. Our wish: to add more flavors to a reality that seems to be stuck in one single flavor.”

Sonia Fernández Pan