Itinerary
42 contents
42 contents
Ràdio Web MACBA. An unusual top 10… for an unusual anniversary
Here we are highlighting three podcasts among its multiple lines of research. This is today’s selection, and tomorrow’s may be different.
We are celebrating 25 years of the MACBA now. And Ràdio Web MACBA, the MACBA’s online radio project, has been there for 14 of them, accompanying it and nourishing its archives with orality, knowledges and learnings with a collection of more than 800 podcasts and custom-made documents.
Here we are highlighting three podcasts among its multiple lines of research. This is today’s selection, and tomorrow’s may be different.
NO. 1 — THINKING WITH FEMINISMS…
“So we had to create, between an art history and an art world completely indifferent to women, and a women’s movement completely indifferent to art, a space where we could try and work this out.”
A key exponent of feminism in the disciplines of art history and cultural studies, Griselda Pollock talks about her involvement in the Women’s Movement in England in the seventies, and about the points of convergence between feminism and art history.
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“The approach of put more women in positions of power but don’t change it’ comes down to the same thing in the end: add women and stir.”
Philosopher, mathematician, sociologist, and activist Raquel Gutiérrez talks about semantic revision and political experimentation, about popular feminisms and the women’s struggle, about her notion of “politics in feminine” and about what happens when Suma Qamaña (living well) stops being a path and becomes a model.
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“The microhistory of this country has not yet been told. There are many voices missing. Of mothers, neighbours, women workers, of trans people, of transvestites…”
Fefa Vila Nuñez is a queer feminist ‘artivist’, sociologist, mother, essayist, teacher, and many other things. Here she reflects on queerness as a state of radical estrangement, which is constantly being redefined. She also outlines a genealogy of the queer, feminist, and sexual dissidence movements in the Spanish state from the 1970s on.
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NO. 2 — MAKING NOISE…
“In my adolescence I knew about new music without having heard it. When you’re thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen years old and you’re thirsting for something new, well, you imagine it.”
From the first childhood musical memories to his theories on plurifocal listening, we follow the development of musician and bell expert Llorenç Barber’s career in chronological order.
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Playing phenomena as a compositional material
By engaging with the use of psychoacoustic producing sound objects as a compositional material the composer creates work that can act to recalibrate the listeners sense of hearing, illuminating not only what we hear but how we hear.
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“No horror film involving evil children or haunted nurseries is allowed not to have either a toy piano or a music box tinkling away on its soundtrack.”
In PROBES #24, toys, music boxes and balloons find new roles in contemporary compositions, pop performances, film scores and jazz improvisation, as composers explore alternative acoustic sources for extended, non-electronic, sounds.
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NO. 3 — SENSING SILENCES…
“Silence and invisibility have to be challenged. To speak is a way to make something public, is a way to come out, is a way to make yourself extremely transparent to what is happening to you, to what your desires or your fears are.”
Silence = Death, claimed the 80s ACT UP slogan. Here art historian, critic, and activist Élisabeth Lebovici reflects on the AIDS crisis during that decade, and on the crucial role of conceptual art and activism in shaping the new visual and affective paradigms which gave voice to communities that the capitalist society was striving to smother.
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The Zen Buddhists insist that during meditation the practitioner must focus exclusively on their breath. When stray thoughts enter your mind, you must always go back to your breath. The artists featured in this mix want to make us aware of the same thing: by highlighting our most commonly shared bodily function and using it as the basis for sonic exploration, they reveal something at once cosmic and mundane.
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“I understand when actors don’t want to do my pieces, because anonymity is not what they got into this for.”
David Levine works in, with, or towards theatre, depending on how you look at it. In this podcast he shares the historical precedents of what he calls “infiltrations” in everyday life. Almost an hour chatting about reality and fiction, representation, invisibility, loops, and disappearances of all kinds.
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NO. 4 — PLAYING WITH LANGUAGE…
“Language is the cheapest technology.”
Spanish poet María Salgado talks about low-tech poetry, syncretism, spoken text, writing and orality, busy channels, the powers of the prefix ‘an’, drugs, and the productive tension between expressions used on the streets and those stored in books.
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In 1950, after meeting Isidore Isou and joining the Lettrist movement, Gil J Wolman invented the notion of ‘mégapneumie’, poems of breath and pure sound. Although his seminal sound work has been largely overlooked, it was a precursor of sound poetry and is one of the key elements of Lettrist poetry.
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“I finally reached dematerialization with poetry. After 50 years of struggling against matter.”
Argentinian artist Roberto Jacoby opens up his poetry books and talks about writing, inspiration, plundering and dematerialisation; about blacks and whites, sofa-beds, politics and activism from the Global South.
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NNO. 5 — COPING WITH THE SYSTEMIC CRISIS…
“Depression is a political problem.”
Mark Fisher was a British writer, teacher, and cultural theorist whose legacy, after his death in 2017, remains one of the pillars of contemporary theory. Here he talks about crisis, insurrection, and the dangerous idea of capitalism as the only conceivable container.
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“The problem with past moments is that they have been incorporated in these continuous historical narratives that are generally the narratives of the state. So you actually have to do quite a lot of labour to free these moments up again.”
Professor emeritus of comparative literature at New York University Kristin Ross believes that we should not have a pedagogical relationship with the past. History does not hold lessons for us. It is instead a vast archive of ideas and experiences, which, on coming in contact with the figurability of the present, can help us to face it.
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“With Communicative Capitalism we have tons of participation; everybody is sharing their opinions, everybody is talking about everything all the time, and that has produced political deadlocks, extreme inequality, and the rise of a fascist right.”
Activist and academic Jodi Dean about communism as a still-latent project, about the Party as a scalable global form, about dystopian municipalism, anamorphic ecologies and liberal democracies.
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NO. 6 — THINKING WITH IMAGES…
“During certain political crisis such as the AIDS crisis or the riots that took place in Britain in the early 80s, there was a demand for representation, from the struggles of a self-representation…”
Filmmaker and artist Isaac Julien talks about the need to give a voice and body to dissident black identity and desire in the cinematic imaginary, as a means of dismantling the hegemonising whiteness.
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“Contemporary forms of censorship are no longer based on eliminating, blocking or forbidding information, but rather on dissolving everything in an entire absolutely chaotic avalanche of data that means that what is important gets buried.”
Joan Fontcuberta’s work challenges the authenticity of images and their capacity to represent and take the place of the real world, while at the same time questioning the always porous boundaries between reality and fiction. Fontcuberta is interested in the social roles of photography, the public use of images, information overload, and the processes for knowledge production and transmission processes.
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“When we were reading Freud we found that in spite of his blind spots he was interested in the same questions that we were interested in: how gender was produced, what was the problem of the female body in patriarchal society…”
Laura Mulvey contextualises, updates, and elucidates on the far-reaching impact of her key text “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, where she coined the notion of the “male gaze” in classic Hollywood cinema and addressed the power asymmetry in representation and assigned gender roles, thus emphasising the patriarchal ideological agenda of the American film industry.
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NÚM. 7 — RECUPEREM L’ESPAI RADIOFÒNIC…
![Son[i]a #317](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/2360680927_ddbe15dcd4_k-1.jpg)
“We had a 5-watt capacity [transmitter], the size of a cigarette pack. The antenna was made of glued aluminium strips on the cover sheet of a tent and we could fold it all in a little backpack.”
In the 90s, 20 minutes was all it took for local authorities in the Austrian city of Graz to 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.
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“When you define something, you also define something out. And I think that is a bit problematic. Sound art could be so many different things.”
Sound artist Maia Urstad talks about nostalgia, time pips, AM, FM and DAB, about arches and obelisks, sounds in the fjord, and time capsules, foghorns, and about local radio stations and lost tapes.
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The Little People in the Radio present…
Transmission artist Anna Friz’s presents a mix collage exploring the environment, morphology and taxonomy of the little people inside the radio.
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NO. 8 — TOUCHING THE BODY AND GESTURE…
“Dance disappears and vanishes. You think you have a memory for it but you don’t. You think your notes are very exact; some of them are, some of them are not. Most of them are not.”
Choreographer and dancer Yvonne Rainer talks about the passing of time, the transferability of dance, training as legacy and the body’s filmic decay. And about the turns, leaps, and tumbles of a multifaceted career spanning more than half a century.
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“As a dancer your body is often tattooed with the signature of the choreographer you worked with. But the truth is: you gave your movement to the choreographer.”
Choreographer and dancer Boris Charmatz reflects on how to address power structures within the artistic field. He also talks about polysemy, collectivity, communities and anti-communities, radical pedagogy, and the complex and inexhaustible relationship between dance and history.
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![Son[i]a #311](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/3_img-wowawiwa-bare-1_0.jpg)
“Let the ear shape choreography.”
Alma Söderberg 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.
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NÚM. 9 — ABORDEM ELS LÍMITS BIOFÍSICS DEL PLANETA…
“The real task is to assume a more humble utopianism. A utopianism that is more linked, to use a literary metaphor, to coming home.”
Activist and academic Emilio Santiago Muiño talks about salad gardens in museums, social movements and public policies, about oil as a magical substance, about re-greening, ecofascism, acceleration, and degrowth.
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![Son[i]a #313](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/screen-shot-2020-05-25-at-12.38.40_1.png)
“When the only thing we can think about for solving such a critical moment is another app, there is clearly a huge crisis of imagination.”
Through a combination of artistic research, detective work, and an almost forensic approach to our own data trail, Joana’s work exposes some of the most pressing issues of our data-driven, data-centric existence.
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![Son[i]a #314](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/file-20181019-105748-11n8jxi_0.jpeg)
“You think about what justice would mean. At the moment it’s conversations around loss and damages. How could you ever compensate for that? An entire land gone and indigenous people displaced forever.”
Political geographer and sound artist Anja Kanngieser talk about expanded listening 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.
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NO. 10 — DISMANTLING RACIALISATION…
“Race is going to give meaning to capitalist colonialism, as sex gave meaning to the patriarchy. And race and sex are going to cross paths in multiple hierarchies.”
Maya Kaqchikel researcher, teacher, writer, and activist Aura Cumes charts a lucid historical path through colonial processes, analysing the mechanisms of control, violence, and dispossession that have perversely shaped the identity of the native-servant, relegated in favour of the progress and well-being of white men, their families, and their capital.
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“The notion of the single mother from an african perspective is an oxymoron. ¿Single and mother? A mother is not single.”
Professor Oyèrónké Oyèwùmi talks about age, seniority, and respect, about unscrupulousness and academia, dispossession and spirituality. 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.
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“How does one understand modernity with regard to these black bodies who are the producers of the sweetness that is sugar?”
In this mini-series, researcher and curator Lucia Piedra Galarraga, teacher and researcher Karo Moret, and teacher and researcher Diego Falconí talk about anti-coloniality and anti-racism from the perspective of people of African descent.
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