This podcast, hosted by Katrine Elise Pedersen, immerses us in aspects of artist Diana Policarpo’s latest project ‘Nets of Hyphae’, touching themes such as queer ecology, botanical and ancestral knowledge, biohacking, and herbal medicine.

Feminist theorist and molecular biologist Deboleena Roy discusses the importance of attuning to different bodies and different knowers, both human and non-human. For Roy, this realization came through endless hours together with the very objects of the research she was conducting. Sociologist and Research Director at CNRS Morgan Meyer and herbalist and anthropologist Charis Boke respectively discuss medical knowledge produced and cultivated beyond the boundaries of scientific institutions: biohacking and Western herbalism. In different ways, both embrace the principles of openness, decentralization, and the sharing of knowledge.

Non-linear Networks of Mycelium, Flesh and Wheat, Promptly Surfacing to the Earth

‘Learning, a Biological Ability’ is a podcast that borrows its title from Munir Fasheh´s ideas on education. Hosted by Dani Burrows the podcast expands on the work ‘Barruntaremos’ by Asunción Molinos Gordo who invited collaborators Munir Fasheh, Reef Fakhouri and Dina Bataineh to share their ideas on how personal stories are powerful departure points for exploring sources of knowledge, harnessing the diversity of wisdom to emancipate learning and foster personal wellness, our communities and our planet.

Learning, a Biological Ability

Preventing Delayed Deaths from War: Issues of Unexploded Ordnance in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia

This episode, inspired by the short film “The Sounds of Canons Familiar Like Sad Refrains” by artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen, addresses the problems posed by unexploded ordnance and landmines left in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia after the end of the Vietnam War, as well as the ongoing humanitarian efforts and clearance operations that try to make this land safe for its people. This conversation is hosted by curator Nhung Walsh, who is joined by Chuck Searcy from Project RENEW and Pham Thi Hoang Ha from PeaceTrees Vietnam.
 
It is hard to mention any Hollywood movies or documentaries about the Vietnam War without thinking of airstrikes and bombardments, and the iconic footage in which we see the destruction of forests, rivers, lands, and the humans inhabiting them. War itself is catastrophic, but nearly five decades after the war ended, hundreds of thousands of people, including children, still continue to lose their lives or are injured by the bombs and mines that have been left behind. In “Nothing Never Dies,” Pulitzer-prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen says that “we must also tell the war stories that made ghosts and made us ghosts.” Unexploded ordnances are more than war ghosts, they are the most destructive and direct extension of a war that is still taking lives in time of peace.

Contributors:  Chuck Searcy and Ha Pham  
Conducted by Nhung Walsh

Preventing Delayed Deaths from War...

What would happen if we engaged in a speculative exploration of queer futurities—an “elsewhere” that would rupture the continuity and pervasiveness of neoliberalism and narratives of terror? Ghiwa Sayegh, together with Nacira Guénif and Hanna Al-Taher, evoke the possibility of different geographies, weaving in history, myth, and personal stories, so they can explore various transnational links. Contexts that are part of a continuum of control and surveillance, such as in France, do not operate in isolation from each other. When control becomes the context, infrastructures can be recognized as modes of coercion and hegemony. In this podcast speakers therefore think through borders and commodities that, unlike people, can move, in spite of a regime of passports as anti-travel documents. Ultimately, they question citizenship, and by extension nation-states, as tools of coercion instead of carriers of rights.


Contributors: Nacira Guénif & Hanna Al-Taher
Conducted by Ghiwa Sayegh

Speculations for an Elsewhere: Terror, Control, and Borders

The conversation begins by unpacking the idea of the Anthropocene with ecosystem scientist professor Yadvinder Malhi who talks about why a deep time perspective helps us understand how truly volatile the planet is. He also discusses the need for evidence-based science that’s inclusive of indigenous knowledge, which offers more sustainable ways of relating to the environment. 

Even while the scientific establishment grapples with what is already known about changing ecosystems to enact policy and systemic change, there are parts of India where narratives and data remain suppressed and ignored by mainstream media. 

Public health researcher Shweta Narayan speaks about this disparity in media coverage between the Global North and South, as well as between rural and urban areas within India, as a manifestation of environmental racism. In India, lower caste and indigenous (Adivasi) bodies bear the brunt of toxicity in their environment, while their land and labor fuels petrocapitalism’s extractive rampant greed. 

Journalist and poet Jacinta Kerketta, who grew up near the Saranda Forest in Jharkhand, Asia’s largest Sal forest, which is now being destroyed by mining, talks of the disproportionate impact of pollution on India’s oppressed and marginalized Adivasi and Dalit communities. She talks of how addressing systemic inequality and engaging with the Adivasi worldview, that looks at the environment holistically to recognize just how interconnected we are, can help us weather our own climate emergencies.

Contributors: Jacinta Kerketta, Shweta Narayan and Yadvinder Malhi
Conducted by Aruna Chandrasekhar

Articulate Matter

In this podcast and thanks to Markus Reymann, director of TBA21–Academy, we dive deeper into the dramatic situation of the coral reefs to better understand Claudia Comte’s work. Marine biologists Denise Henry and David Gruber talk about corals: their importance in the ecosystem, their symbiotic relationships, and their ability to sense oncoming disasters. The notions of shape and time, and the importance of restoration—like the reef rehabilitation work developed by the Alligator Head Foundation in Port Antonio, Jamaica—become key to understanding this aquatic life-form.

Corals: Nature, Symbiosis, and Restoration

‘Monodia fiera del subsuelo’ (Fierce Monody from the Subsoil) is an experimental sound piece that departs from a poem written by Regina de Miguel, which links two apparently opposing territories: Deception Island in Antarctica and Rio Tinto in Spain. 
 
Both places contain extremophile microscopic life, which was inconceivable until recently. The island, a submerged volcano of unique characteristics and unpredictable nature, and the mythical acidic waters river, in addition to being analogous to Mars on our planet, are both witnesses to a series of extremely violent events: the intensive slaughter of whales until 1930 and the brutal repression of the mining, ecological, and farming movement of the Año de los tiros (Year of the Shootings) in 1888. Both challenge us about the problems and limits of life itself.  
 
Through a reinterpretation of a fandango, a traditional style of flamenco from Huelva (Spain), and with the collaboration of Adrián de Alfonso, Víctor Herrero, and Rocío Guzmán, Fierce Monody features a voice moving between epochs and transiting through the memories of the subsoil. This song is an offering, a profane ex-voto that appeals to the dissolution of the frontiers between the living and the inanimate from a place of urgency and interdependence.

Created by Regina de Miguel
Monodia fiera del subsuelo (Fierce Monody from the Subsoil), 2021
Sound
10 min 30 sec
Guitarist Victor Herrero | Producer Adrián de Alfonso | Singer Rocío Guzmán
Commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) for st_age

‘Monodia fiera del subsuelo’ (Fierce Monody from the Subsoil), 2021

This podcast, departing from Regina de Miguel's experimental sound piece for st_age, is hosted by writer and curator Àngels Miralda in conversation with specialists in topics related to the site of Río Tinto in Andalucia. Javier García Fernández is a historian specializing in the social struggles of rural Andalucía, and Juan Ángel Vaquerizo is a physicist working in the Centro de Astrobiología (CSIC-INTA) in Torrejón de Ardoz, Madrid. Through these perspectives, we see a territory full of life and resistance, framed by a geography that is not only on the extremity of Europe, but is also one of the most extreme landscapes on earth.

Resilient Geologies

Associate Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University and Director of the Aarhus University Centre for Environmental Humanities, Heather Anne Swanson describes the tightened relationships between the oceans and the British canals. These infrastructures were introduced as part of the British empire and global shipping commerce in the 17th century. Since then, the canals have not merely transformed England’s landscapes and fresh waters as they were fashioned into an effective means to transport goods; they have also become an ecological space where ocean materialities and freshwater lifeworlds merge. Swanson invites us to question "What may be noticed if we study oceans from inland areas?" – a line of research that has grounded her collaboration in Sonia Levy's film, Creatures of the Lines, presented on st_age.

By Heather Anne Swanson with Sonia Levy

Waters of Connection: Marine Transport, Introduced Organisms, and Inland Ecologies

Departing from the work of Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa ‘Hocho’ (Abrirse las orejas / To Open One's' Ears, 2022) this podcast is hosted by the activist and researcher Aura Cumes, who is accompanied by the historian and anthropologist Edgar Esquit, and the economist, poet, creator, musician, and editor Kaypa' Tz'iken. Also taking Fray Francisco Morán’s 1695 Spanish-Ch’olti’ dictionary, Arte y vocabulario de la lengua Ch’olti’ as a reference, this podcast explores the geography and history of the Ch’olti’ community, as well as the process of christianization, colonial violence, genocide, and ethnocide to which this people were subjected together with other Mayan cultures, but also the defense mechanisms and fierce resistance with which they challenged it. This conversation looks into the past, but also defiantly into the present and future of the Mayan communities, in both their cultural-linguistic and political dimensions, with the aim of creating spaces of dialogue for those voices that have been silenced.

Contributors : Edgar Esquit & Kaypa' Tz’iken
Hosted by Aura Cumes

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa
‘Hocho’(Abrirse las orejas/To Open One's' Ears), 2022
Sound
varying durations
Field and voice recordings made with the assistance of Ameno Cordova and Stef Arreaga

Commissioned by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary for TB21 on st_age and supported with extra funds from the Inga Maren Otto Fellowship (The Watermill Center, NY)

Image credit:
Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa
Huertos de los ch’olti (VII), 2021
Watercolor and pencil on paper, series of 21
29.7 x 20.6cm
Courtesy of the artist

Las voces de los ch'olti’ hablan al presente

In this podcast, anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Aarhus University, Denmark, meets Heather Anne Swanson, a fellow anthropologist at Aarhus University and collaborative partner for Sonia Levy’s film Creatures of the Lines (2021) previously presented on TBA21 on st_age. Tsing is the author of several books, including The Mushroom at the End of the World, as well as a co-editor of the digital project Feral Atlas together with Jennifer Deger, Alder Saxena Keleman, and FeiFei Zhou. 

In the podcast, Tsing and Swanson discuss several of Tsing’s recent projects, while also describing the significance that these approaches had on Creatures of the Lines (2021). Along the way, this conversation covers wide-ranging topics, including Tsing’s notion of feral ecologies—i.e. those shaped by interactions with human infrastructures, but outside of the control of the humans who designed those infrastructures. The dialogue also features a special focus on oceanic and coastal contexts, including Tsing’s new work on mangroves in Southeast Asia and her idea of “fragmented porosities” as well as its conceptual links with Levy’s film on British canal worlds. Both cases highlight how colonial infrastructures are part and parcel of Anthropocene ecologies.

Feral Ecologies: Infrastructures and Modes of Intervention

This podcast, accompanying Laia Estruch’s performance project for TBA21 on st_age, is hosted by curator, writer, and lifelong birder Max Andrews. It takes flight into the realm of birds, looking at politics and practices that disrupt dominant historical narratives and exceed scientific and cultural boundaries. Alex Holt is a spokesperson for Bird Names for Birds, a movement to decolonise bird names, and Hollis Taylor is a zoömusicologist specializing in birdsong. Through their perspectives we glimpse new and speculative kinds of human–bird narratives; what Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin have described as “minor ornithologies.” 

Credits:
Contributors: Alex Holt and Hollis Taylor
Conducted by Max Andrews

Audio Clips Credits:
PIED BUTCHERBIRD SINGING. “Wordsworth” abandons formal song with a coda of mimicry, recorded 28 September 2007 on Wordsworth Road, N Queensland at 4:10am. © Hollis Taylor / piedbutcherbird.net

SUPERB LYREBIRD SINGING. Audio clip #5: Mimicry of birdsong and two flute phrases from a “flute lyrebird” recorded at Enfield State Forest (130 kilometres from Allan’s Water) at 6:53 a.m. on 16 June 2013 by Hollis Taylor. © Hollis Taylor / flutelyrebird.com

------

The concept of "Minor Ornithology" was coined by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin in 2013 and is their title of an ongoing series of multidisciplinary collaborations within their curatorial framework Reassembling the Natural / reassemblingnature.org and their edited publication, These Birds of Temptation (K. Verlag & Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2021).

“Minor” Ornithologies

This podcast, which accompanies the video work The Mountain That Hid by Sim Chi Yin on TBA21 on st_age, is hosted by researcher and curator Kathleen Ditzig. Through the perspective of literature and the work of Tash Aw and Preeta Samarasan, it examines how poetic license and personal family stories can speak to uncomfortable political Cold War histories that are part of nation-building projects in Southeast Asia. Aw and Samarasan are two diasporic Malaysian writers, whose works have included familial and generational narratives to speak to the long reach of the region’s and Malaysia’s racial and political histories. Through their perspectives, this podcast touches on the necessary nuance of considering anti-colonial projects, the radicality of writing family histories, and the necessity of criticality in reviewing national histories and the gaps, erasures, and silences they leave in their wake.

Credits:
Contributors Tash Aw & Preeta Samarasan
Conducted by Kathleen Ditzig
Cover image: Sim Chi Yin

The Stories We Tell

This podcast, conducted by visual artist and film scholar Pallavi Paul, explores the relationship between image making and the ecological. Departing from artist Pranay Dutta’s piece Neti (2022), dealing with the Sundarbans regions in South-East Asia, Paul interviews artist,  photographer, environmental campaigner, writer, and curator Ravi Agarwal, and filmmaker, video artist, and film scholar Shaunak Sen. Unfolding across geological time scales on the one hand and microscopic cellular life on the other, the 'ecological' is often in excess of optical infrastructures. What does this mean for photography and cinema? Is an apocalyptic world a world without people or a world without images? What is the stake of art in ecological justice?

Credits:
Contributors Ravi Agarwal and Shaunak Sen
Conducted by Pallavi Paul

Between Seeing and Sensing: Ecological Images

The work of Ana María Millán (Santiago de Cali, 1975) uses the language of video games to channel collective work processes, in which she addresses diverse realities that are constructed as they are enunciated. Popular feminism, the struggle against extractivism, and the Colombian Pacific have been key issues of Millán’s work in recent years. Through the voices of philosopher Michael Marder, who talks about his thinking on the spirituality of plants, and sociologist and popular feminist activist Betty Ruth Lozano, we explore ways of thinking that inform Ana María Millán's practice.

Catalina Lozano


Credits:
Contributors: Michael Marder and Betty Ruth Lozano 
Conducted by Catalina Lozano

Un tiempo más allá del progreso (A time beyond progress)

Drawing on the importance of poetry and the practice of symbolic interpretation for an evolving politics in Omarzad’s practice, this podcast is hosted by philosopher and writer Federico Campagna, who is joined by contributors Dr Lucy Mercer, lecturer of creative writing at Goldsmith University and author of the recent poetry book Emblem (Prototype, 2022), and Arianna Dalla Costa, from the Warburg Institute, researcher on the ancient arts of divination and geomancy.

Two areas of tension are explored: poetry and politics; magic and science. Emblems, as thresholds between image and text, are discussed with Dr Mercer: their origin and definition, symbology and function, as well as their convergences and divergences with memes and instagram motivational posts. Dalla Costa discusses divination and geomancy, looking into their etymologies and particularities within the context of the intellectual encounter between different monotheistic religions in the Medieval Mediterranean, challenging contemporary understandings of the age of the Crusades as a time of intolerance. 

Credits:
Contributors Lucy Mercer and Arianna Dalla Costa
Conducted by Federico Campagna

Nature As Book: Emblems, Divination, and Geomancy

Cultural theorist, Astrida Neimanis’ theory of Hydrofeminism, positions water as an ever-shifting body that connects all beings and archives all histories. Unlike other bodies of water however, the permafrost wishes to remain still. Astrida Neimanis speaks with permafrost hydrologist, Nikita Tananaev to discuss the cultural, philosophical, and ecological implications of permafrost degradation as it disrupts ancient ecosystems suspended in the ice.

This podcast was first released by RW MACBA, before the UK sanctions of the Dissolving Earths program were lifted.

The soundscape and sound-editing is by Either/Or Productions.

If you want to delve deeper into the permafrost, visit the full online programme Dissolving Earths https://dissolving.earth/

Credits:
Cover image: al-yené, ‘ærystıьla,’ 2022, video still

Undead Matter

Permafrost Hydrofeminism | Astrida Neimanis and Nikita Tananaev

Artist Bo Choy speaks with Sayana Namsaraeva, an anthropologist from Buryatia, a republic in Eastern Siberia bordering Mongolia, whose work focuses on the Indigenous cosmologies of the people from her region. Together they delve into animated landscapes that surround Lake Baikal, the deepest and oldest freshwater lake on the planet.

Their conversation considers the intimate connection between these largely untouched landscapes and the rich fabric of belief systems, Indigenous cosmologies, oral traditions, and mythologies that emerge from them. Moving through their shared and diverging influences spanning pre-Buddhism shamanisms, Chinese and Mongolian Buddhisms, Feng Shui, and ancient eastern philosophies, Bo Choy and Sayana Namsaraeva discuss the spirit-life of these lands as they rub up against planetary climate urgencies, and contemplate how ancient wisdoms can have a vital role in the local and global relational ecologies we must form for the future.


If you want to delve deeper into the permafrost, visit the full online programme Dissolving Earths https://dissolving.earth/

Credits:
Soundscape and sound-editing by Either/Or Productions.
Cover image: Bo Choy, ‘These Yearnings Of The Exiled Souls, To Which Time Shall We Send Them?,’ 2022, video still

Umbilical Lands And The Shape-Shifting Lives Of Rivers | Bo Choy and Sayana Namsaraeva

Focusing on the fascinating species of the sperm whale, this conversation brings together José Luis Espejo, researcher and curator, and Txema Brotons, biologist specialized in whales and acoustics, and Tursiops' Association scientific director. The podcast proposes an archaeology of the means by which science and other branches of knowledge first began to listen to and classify cetacean sounds. The scientific research carried out can help us understand the impact of anthropogenic sound on the communication systems of whales, with a focus on the cachalots. 


The podcast departs from talk took place at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, on May 25, 2023, as a part of the public program of the exhibition “Wu Tsang: Of Whales.”


Are you eager to dive deeper into the Ocean? Explore the vast depths of knowledge and immerse yourself in https://ocean-archive.org/, TBA21–Academy’ digital platform.

Credits:
Txema Brotons in conversation with José Luis Espejo
Cover image: Cocos Research Expedition, 2014.  Photo: Jose Alejandro Alvarez.

Cachalotes: Escuchando al Oceáno (Sperm Whales: Listening to the Ocean)

In this podcast Carlos Duarte, scientist and oceanographer, discusses how anthropogenic noise—meaning noise produced by human beings and the machines they make and use—produces an impact on marine fauna, and asks how it is possible to reverse this impact of human pollution. Duarte tells us about the efforts to understand how sound communication functions in the Ocean among the different species, and the importance of art in conveying this to the general public in order to put policies into action.


The podcasts consists of interventions by Carlos Duarte, extracted from the conversation with sound artist Jana Winderen, in a talk moderated by curator and researcher José Luis Espejo that took place at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid on April 18, 2023, which was part of the public program of the exhibition “Wu Tsang: Of Whales.”


Are you eager to dive deeper into the Ocean? Explore the vast depths of knowledge and immerse yourself in https://ocean-archive.org/, TBA21–Academy’ digital platform.

Credits:
Speaker: Carlos Duarte
Cover image: Whales, Silverbanks Research Expedition, 2013. Photo: Jose Alejandro Alvarez.

Marine Anthropogenic Noise: Listening to the Ocean

A piece of architecture is a fraction of a more extensive infrastructure. An experience of a building lingers, capturing the essence of a particular time and place. Modern architecture created motifs that traveled to other cities. Versions of these motifs often evoke a sense of familiarity when their variations are encountered. Some modern monuments' direct relationship to past regimes puts them at risk of being neglected, destructed, repurposed, or even preserved for myriad reasons. Often, there is no comprehensive framework in place to address their significance or ensure their preservation. This podcast delves into the interpretation of monumental projects as evidence of intricate relationships between regimes. It also reflects on the intangible yet profound impact of stories and their transformative impact on architecture, revealing the complex interplay between politics, imagination, and the ever-changing nature of constructed environments. 

Ala Younis 

Credits:
Contributors: Dina Taha and Ali Yass
Conducted by Ala Younis
https://www.stage.tba21.org/episode/sahil-naik

Creating one's own––The lingering presence of stories and their impact on architecture

This podcast is based on the work of the artist Irene de Andrés, A orillas del Manzanares (On the Banks of the Manzanares River, 2022), whose research originates in a pool shaped like an ocean liner, known as La Isla (the island), which was built in the Madrilenian Manzanares river in the 1930s. 

With the help of two experts—Malú Cayetano, landscape designer and forestry engineer, and David Uribelarrea del Val, professor of geomorphology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid—we open a conversation about the Manzanares river, understood as a theater of memory, that puts into circulation the layers and flows of a city in relation to the forms of life that its river has made and will continue to make possible.

Violeta Janeiro Alfageme

Credits:
Contributors: Malú Cayetano and David Uribelarrea del Val
Conducted by Violeta Janeiro Alfageme

Río Manzanares: un teatro para la memoria (The Manzanares River: A Theatre for Memory)

The Climate Matters podcast will delve into the socio-political and economic contexts surrounding the climate change conversation in India. Through engaging discussions and expert insights, our guests will shed light on the frameworks and challenges related to climate policy and environmental law with a special focus on the communities most affected by climate change. The podcast will take a comprehensive approach to unpacking the complexities of climate action in India.

This podcast was produced and hosted by Khoj team members Alina Tiphagne, Head of Media and Communications, and Isha Bhattacharya, Junior Curator and Program Manager, who are accompanied by award-winning independent science journalist Disha Shetty, who writes mainly on public health, climate change, and women; Shibani Ghosh, environmental lawyer and fellow at the Centre of Policy Research (CPR), who specializes in environmental and access to information laws; and Awadhendra Sharan, Director of the Centre for study of developing societies (CSDS), whose research interests are in the fields of urban and environmental studies, present in his most recent publication Dust and Smoke: Air Pollution and Colonial Urbanism, India (2020). 

Credit:
Contributors Disha Shetty, Shibani Ghosh, and Awadhendra Sharan
Conducted by Alina Tiphagne and Isha Bhattacharya

Link to full st_age episode: https://www.stage.tba21.org/episode/khoj-and-zuleikha-chudari

Climate Matters

In this podcast, artist and researcher Susana Jiménez Carmona talks with scientists Claudio Barría, a marine biologist, and Michel André, a bioacoustician. Both are involved to different degrees in the artistic production and research project ruido ê by Silvia Zayas, an audiovisual and performing artist—a fragment of the film ruido ê can be seen on this same platform. Some issues raised by or arising during the development of this project are addressed here by Barría and André, including interspecific coexistence in coastal cities, encounters with elusive electric rays, the effects of anthropogenic noise on living creatures and marine ecosystems, and collaborations between disparate humans.

Text by Susana Jimenéz Carmona

Credits:
Conducted by Susana Jimenez Carmona
Contributors: Michel André and Claudio Barria

Tan lejos tan cerca, ruido (So far so close, noise)

Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, Fana Fraser is currently a U.S. based contemporary dance artist who explores the nature and essence of things within a framework of exploratory embodiment. Her short film, nesting (2023), was filmed both in and near water, at the intersection of physical and philosophical constructs of borders, urgency, and care. It enjoins us to consider the environment, our responsibilities, and our humanity, and, although the film was shot on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, it evokes a feeling of Caribbean consciousness and reality. 
 
Three artists who live and work in the Caribbean region—dance practitioners Sonja Dumas (host) and neila ebankhs, from Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica respectively, as well as Trinidad and Tobago poet Shivanee Ramlochan—examine the work in the context of the Caribbean’s relationship to its environment, the ache of its past, and musings on its future.

Sonja Dumas

Credits:
Contributors: Shivanee Ramlochan and neila ebankhs
Conducted by Sonja Dumas

Of History, Habitat, and The Shore: Framing a Caribbean Discourse around Fana Fraser’s “nesting”

For video podcast in sign language please visit st_age website on the following link: https://www.stage.tba21.org/detail/ocean-for-all

-----------------------------------

Abecedarium. The Ocean in Sign Language is the name of a multi-year educational and participatory project in collaboration with ENS, Ente Nazionale Sordi (Italian Deaf Agency), and CNR ISMAR, Institute of Marine Sciences.

The main idea of the project is to create an eco-glossary in sign language, beginning with Italian sign language, before moving to other countries and international signs related to the marine world and the climate emergency. The ocean covers almost the entire Earth, and all human lives depend on the ocean—from the air we breathe to the food we eat to what we wear. Yet the ocean is also endangered because of the great impact of human activities. 

To be able to care for the Ocean it is absolutely fundamental that everybody has access to artistic content and scientific knowledge without exclusion. We all need to be involved in safeguarding the planet, and everyone must have the information and tools required to access it. 

‘Abecedarium, The Ocean in Sign Language’ proposes a vision of an ocean sea as an open access for all to information. This is an engaging and inspirational ocean, where different expressions and experiences converge, and are also translated into tangible manifestations related to contemporary culture.  

Art, in the values it expresses, can be an effective means of social development to achieve this change. Building the possibility of interpreting our history together through training activities, and creating new forms of expression for new situations, for new worlds, means opening up to new areas of cultural growth, thereby guaranteeing processes of democracy, equity, exchange, and cultural interaction between the various components of society.

Contributors: Angela Pomaro and Mirko Santoro
Conducted by Valeria Bottalico

Ocean for all. Art for the development of a sign language eco-glossary

With the rise of artificial intelligence, a new frontier emerges in human cognition and experience. Concepts such as consciousness and creativity are constantly redefined by algorithms and code performances. Extraction, manipulation, and radicalization are some of the intensified side effects of applying computational techniques to traditional media. Can adopting radical transparency, decentralization, and the inclusion of non-human perspectives help us steer this new media toward becoming a productive force of sustainability and regeneration? 
One of the central topics of this episode is the concept of deep fakes, an emergent technology with profound societal implications. The episode further delves into its intricacies through a podcast hosted by Marta Peirano, a journalist specializing in technology and power, who is joined by researcher specializing in deep fakes Henry Ajder and human rights advocate and technologist Sam Gregory. Together, they offer invaluable perspectives on the opportunities and challenges posed by synthetic media. 

Credits:
Contributors: Henry Ajder and Sam Gregory
Conducted by Marta Peirano

Decoding Deep Fakes: AI, Ethics, and the Power of Media

Subcontinentment is a manifesto that stems from my fieldwork in the polar circles, where I was confronted with my alienness as a brown body in a landscape commonly used for outer-space simulation experiments. As part of a series of fictional ice archives, south asian futurism, renamed subcontinentment, anti-chronicles the geopoetic links between the poles and the subcontinent. 

In transforming the text into a soundscape, David and I began finding correspondences and intersections between my polar recordings and the hyper, denuded aural environment of Delhi under lockdown. Cawing crows, a static in the ether of the polyphonous city, intertwined with screeching skuas, lone reminders of life in the expansive nothingness of the “white” continent. The whirr of a fan points to the circulation of air, capital, contagion, compassion. The extra-terrestrial echoes of stones skimming on frozen lakes sound like firecrackers, blackening the air with their celebratory overzealousness. گھنگرو‎, ghungroos, the metallic ankle bells of the temple-dancer-by-day, sex-worker-by-night, or ice in a frozen river. The pressure of stretching the word, “rest” builds, it is released as if sounds of government-mandated clangings of pots and pans could avert a pandemic, substitute a virus for a communal agenda. Rhizomatic root structures of melting, frozen lilypads. Lilypads that open at dawn and close at dusk just like the Na'at, poetry sung in praise of Allah, heard in the depths of a tomb.

Credits:
Himali Singh Soin with David Soin Tappeser
Chapter 1: Subcontinentment, 2020, from the ongoing interdisciplinary work: we are opposite like that, 2017-2022
10 min 22 sec
Commissioned and produced by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) for st_age

‘Subcontinentment,’ 2020

‘Antarctica was a queer rave…’ traces the history of conjecture and how the existence of Antarctica was hypothesized. It recounts, in a non-linear fashion, the Western imagination of the savage underworld, an imagination largely based on projection and fear. It turns this same imagination into a utopian desire: a place not populated by horrific freaks with malformed bodies and exquisite tentacles, but free from the normative conditioning of convention and straightness, free from the grids of the map as it dissolves into mists and fog. The music is analogue and recorded rogue, an acoustic rendering of EDM and 1990s rave beats. By recording single-track, on an acoustic drum set, David Soin Tappeser subverts, emulates, and pays homage to contemporary queer party culture.

Credits:
Himali Singh Soin with David Soin Tappeser
Chapter 3: Antarctica was a queer rave before it got busted by colonial white farts, 2020
from the ongoing interdisciplinary work: we are opposite like that, 2017-2022
13 min 59 sec
Commissioned and produced by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) for st_age

‘Antarctica was a queer rave...,’ 2020

Artists and writers explore shifting lands, hybrid bodies, and polar–south asian imaginations. From a super cyclone, to a rhinoceros gift, and an underwater planet, we travel through time, visit the future, but never quite leave the past behind.

Participants: Skye Arundhati Thomas, Raqs Media Collective, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Nabla Yahya, Bishakh Som

Raqs Media Collective make art and curate exhibitions. They time-travel when necessary. They are the artistic directors of the Yokohama Triennale 2020. 

Mary Anne Mohanraj is the author of A Feast of Serendib (Mascot Books, 2020), The Stars Change (Circlet Press, 2013), Bodies in Motion (Harper Collins, 2006), and twelve other titles.

Nabla Yahya is an artist in flux. Her practice stems from an architectural education, and moves into the realm of the metaphysical. She is interested in celluloid, earth, and the ethereal.

Bishakh Som’s graphic novel Apsara Engine (2020) is out now from The Feminist Press. Spellbound: A Graphic Memoir (2020) was recently published by Street Noise Books.

Mario D’Souza is a curator and a writer based between New Delhi and Goa, India. He is presently Associate Curator for the 5th edition of Kochi Muziris Biennale, 2020.

The Future Can Be Excavated from the Past

Patricia Domínguez (Santiago de Chile, 1984) creates installations, videos, and publications that reflect on how late capitalism has triggered the destruction of bodies, both in the physical and social sense. This is a conversation with three people who have inspired and accompanied her work, and in which Domínguez goes deeper into the influences that fields such as anthropology and botany, as well as the political implications of Chilean social organizing, have had on her practice.

Contributors: Alex Vicente (cultural journalist, El País), Rodolfo Andaur (visual arts curator and cultural manager), Lorena Donaire (national representative and spokeswoman of Mujeres MODATIMA) and Raquel González (rural school teacher and director of Las viudas del agua (The Widows of the Water)).

Patricia Domínguez: llamando a la Tierra (Calling Earth)

The traditional populations of the Amazon basin have been able to co-constitute their lives with the forest, creating worlds of mega-diversity where the respectful relations between humans and other-than-humans are ruled by a diplomacy of worlding. Yet since the arrival of Europeans in the early 16th century these worlds have been threatened and endangered. As of today the Brazilian government and global investors continue to promote the conquest of the Amazon with the same extractivist logic that has brought the world to the brink of collapse.

Helena Palmquist was born and lives in the Brazilian Amazon. She is a journalist and has a master’s degree in anthropology from the Federal University of Pará. She is currently an advisor to the Brazil Federal Prosecution Office, where she works with the press, the judiciary, and social and environmental movements.

Conducted by Helena Palmquist

With: Bruna Rocha, Doctor of Archeology, Federal University of Western Pará, and member of the Amazonian Scientific Panel, Geraldo Mosimann Silva, agronomist and Doctor of Geography, Beatriz Almeida Matos, Doctor of Anthropology, Federal University of Pará, Júlia Otero, Doctor of Anthropology, Federal University of Pará, Kleber Karipuna, indigenous Karipuna leader, Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), Adriana Ramos, Instituto Socioambiental, Julio Araujo, Federal Prosecutor, Márcia Zollinger, Federal Prosecutor and Alessandra Kurap Munduruku, indigenous Munduruku leader

Download English transcript: https://bit.ly/37WRR8K

The Dreaming Forest

A sound piece tracing the textures and toxicities of air.

Invoking the presence of jinns to explore the textures and toxicities of air, Safarnama (2020) activates natural and sacred worlds to pay attention to the intimacy of toxic colonialisms. Borrowing its name from and referencing the history of travel literature produced in the Islamic world, Safarnama traces the journey of a jinn traveling through the emerging, extractive infrastructures of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. We turn to these otherworldly beings of air and fire to disrupt colonial protocols of seeing and knowing, to rewire our experiential modes, and to stretch open the possibility of witnessing at a time of heightened policing and repression. The jinn that we seek challenges the state project of erasure. Subsisting below the threshold of official state narratives, the jinn attunes us to the entanglements between sacred, human and ecological worlds. 

Artwork credits:

Saraab (Omer Wasim and Shahana Rajani)
Safarnama, 2020
Sound piece, 2020
23 min 20 sec
Sound design and audio mixing by Mudassir Sheikh
Music played by Taj Mohammad and Abdul Hameed Baloch
Commissioned and produced by KHOJ International Artists' Association and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) for st_age

The narration in Safarnama references the following sources: Anand Taneja, Jinnealogy: Time, Islam and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (Delhi: Stanford University Press, 2018); Nishat Awan and Zahra Hussain, “Conflicting Material Imaginaries,” New Silk Roads, e-flux (January 2020), online; David Abrams, “The Remembering and Forgetting of the Air,” Storytellers before Dawn: An Anthology, eds. Juddha Su and Mi You (2018); an interview conducted by Dr. Hasan Ali Khan who generously shared it with us; and Robert Lebling, Legends of the Fire Spirits (New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2010).

‘Safarnama,’ 2020

TBA21 on st_age is TBA21’s research and commissioning digital space. Based on long-term relationships of trust, it reaches out to bring a multiplicity of voices and contexts into conversation, supporting artist’s needs throughout both research and practice. 

TBA21 on st_age focuses on environmental and social contemporary artistic practices, and presents video, animation, sound, and text works, as well as projects specifically designed to be experienced online. These are accompanied by a series of contextual materials, which make both the work and the research behind it accessible to a broader audience. These materials include artist-curator conversations, editorial podcasts, research clusters, and calls to actions, as well as the backst_age series, which connects the different projects through conversations, video glossaries, and curated views. All featured works remain the property of the artists and authors.

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