“A Place Where There Are Not Words” is episode 27, emerging from one of several encounters with Elin McCready in Tokyo. Besides researching language inside and outside of academia, she's a member of the collectives WAIFU and SLICK. I met Elin during my first few weeks in Japan. I also remember the nuance Elin made regarding safe spaces. It is not the same to say “a safe space to” or “a safe space from.” She would also tell me that identity politics are one thing and personal interactions are quite another. The way in which these contradict each other is something that comes up in many conversations with friends. It often reminds me of an idea by val flores, which I saw expressed in Tokyo with a vivid image of snow on a cherry blossom tree. We must learn to live with contradictory instructions.

Our conversation for this podcast started with the Fueiho Law. It was introduced in 1948 to police nightlife in Japan, banning dancing at specific hours. The club scene in Japan is all about music, as Elin says. Dancing does not mean the same thing in every city, venue or moment in life. A rave is political if its ravers do political action. The same goes for art. Editing the podcast of someone who is so conscious of language, created even more questions. Each voice is a collection of many others. I also believe that we have many voices within us, even contradictory ones. 

“Finding along the way” is episode 26, which follows a conversation with filmmaker Zheng Lu Xinyuan and Sonia Fernández Pan, the host of this podcast series. Xinyuan said she wasn't too worried that Western audiences wouldn't understand her films because they were made for Chinese audiences. Thinking about her comment, Sonia watched some of her films with the feeling of missing something very important due to different cultural sensitivities. Meanwhile, she experienced what we so often feel: the understanding of something without fully comprehending it. Cinema evokes memories and feelings that have been forgotten or hidden for a long time. At the same time, a film can show some emotions while producing different, even contradictory ones.  

Sonia’s questions for the interview were more about feelings than cinema-making: how feelings help us to feel belonging. As Xinyuan recounts, belonging can also be a sentient situation in which the body feels pleasure or comfort. When talking about loss of control, anxiety appears. This feeling is also part of the process of making a film. As Xinyuan says, “finding along the way” is what matters when making films.  

Following Xinyuan's words, “it should not be artists who are afraid of censorship”. Those who censor are the ones who are afraid, but they pass this feeling on to those who are censored. It is not only about your own voice but also about those who accompany and support you so that your voice can speak and be heard.  

We lost the plot, episode 25 of the Tale and the Tongue podcast series, follows a two-instant conversation with artist Ella C Bernard and Sonia Fernández Pan, the host of this podcast series. The two speak about the cultural art scene in Berlin and how political identity has almost become more important than artistic practice, patronizing attitudes, censorship and Ella C Bernard’s personal account of having a Nazi grandfather. 

While Germany talks a lot about its Nazi past, it tells very little about it. Perhaps because it is often Germany that speaks, not Germans speaking in the first person. Unlike many other Germans, Ella C Bernard does not hide her personal and emotional connection to the aftermath of Nazism in German society. As she says, taking responsibility starts with speaking in the first person. And doing so without guilt or shame for a past that is given and not chosen. We can try to be critical individuals and not compliant roles within given plots and scripts.  

A part of censorship is having to measure our tone and our wording, like it is often the case when talking about Israel and Palestine in Germany. As Sonia Fernández Pan says, she feels that moral arrogance, among many other things, is also part of the puzzle. Meanwhile, Ella C Bernard is critical of the state's manipulation of both concepts: culture and remembrance.  

“Listening to Ella talk about her relationship with art, I wonder if the same thing is happening to art that happened to Germany: that we repeat an official narrative that is not really ours.” 

—Sonia Fernández Pan 

A point of contact, a common ground is episode 24 of The Tale and the Tongue podcast series, following a conversation between music journalist, booking agent, event promoter, and translator Yuko Asanuma, and Sonia Fernández Pan, the host of this podcast series. “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

Where does from scratch start? is episode 23, which developed after a conversation with artist Jesse Darling. While I believe that ideas are never entirely our own, there is something very personal in how we express them. Especially when they are joined by life stories, as in Jesse's case. Following Jesse's words during our conversation, the things we do or think come mostly from life experiences. Listening to Jesse, it does not seem accidental how capitalism keeps us strategically busy and tired. Yet, we keep imagining and doing, with what we have and with what we don't have. Perhaps the question is not only how we work, but for what or who we work for. A question I asked Jesse was when does "from scratch" start? The compass is the search for an origin, a beginning, or a starting point. But when the source is multiple, a single origin is quite impossible. 

Inhabiting a Tongue Together is the twenty-second episode of The Tale and the Tongue podcast series. It is a conversation with artist Iz Öztat, driven by the curiosity to learn more about Iz and Zişan, Iz’s close collaborator and her alter ego, a ghost she encounters from time to time.  

 As I got to know Zişan better, a sense of time travel came over me. Every episode of her life is a place of struggle, yet also confidence and desire. To follow Zişan brings you to places and times that we have not lived: the Ottoman Empire, the European avant-garde, the memory of the waters of the Danube, the love between women writers in the 1920s... Thanks to Iz Öztat, Zişan makes the past happen differently. The present is a slippery time. It can move us backward and forwards at the same time. The spirit of the Avant-garde of the last century, promoting European modernity, is not so far removed from our present. The relevance of artistic practices is still decided from the same places, even if their actors come from different locations. And it is here that Zişan appears to challenge and be part of an avant-garde that made Europe the centre of attention. When asking Iz for a different way to introduce Zişan, she would go back to the title of this series. They tell a story inhabiting a tongue together. But this tongue speaks different languages. 

Getting Along with Discomfort is episode twenty-one of The Tale and the Tongue podcast series, which follows a conversation with curator and researcher Rita Ouédraogo on the importance of conversation and exchanges in processes and learning to get along with discomfort. 

 Honesty, something that Rita Ouédraogo brings to our conversation, allows us to know what we can do and where we stand. Many misunderstandings in processes come from not explaining from the start what the conditions and intentions of the projects we work on are. Making them available provides a better understanding of the given structures in which we can work but cannot change. As she says, listening is an essential part of conversation. Discomfort is something that Rita relates to many of her experiences, from different positions and meanings. Far from being a stable place, discomfort is a situation that arises, that morphs, and that never quite goes away. What's more, for Rita it can become a curatorial strategy. Acknowledging that discomfort exists, is knowing how to listen to it when it appears. 

EVERY GESTURE COUNTS, HOWEVER SMALL, is the 20th episode of the “Tale and the Tongue” podcast series. Full of intimate moments, Sonia Fernández Pan exchanged thoughts over months with Karolina Grzywnowicz, talking about plants, migration, activism and much more.

“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 ” 

MOVING IN MIGRANT RHYTHMS is episode nineteen, which follows a conversation with artist and loud thinker Maya Saravia and the podcast host Sonia Fernández Pan. In their conversation the migrant experience is very present. Maya 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 Maya and Sonia share have a lot to do with feeling and thinking with other rhythms.

One of the music genres that Maya 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.

Another of her projects, El Olvido, 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.

HOW CAN A FORM BE A HOLDER FOR INTENTIONS AND IDEAS is episode eighteen, following a conversation with multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer Crystal Z Campbell. While form is one of the meaning-making elements in art, it can be often overlooked. Crystal Z Campbell, who furthermore refers to attention as a form of care, shaped formal relevance from a question: how can a form be a holder, a vessel, for intentions and ideas?

In Crystal's work, which combines the specifics of historical events with the abstraction of artistic gestures and the serendipity of processes, form can be felt in many ways. Crystal's films are temporary places to enter and engage in a sensory relationship with the stories they make present.

The witnessing relationship is also central to Crystal Z Campbell's work. Looking is not only a biological process, but also a historical one. They wonder in a public conversation: “How do we look at things we can't see?” Following Crystal's words, "looking should not be easy". Precisely when things are easy, our attention remains strategically distracted elsewhere, looking without seeing what is in front of us.

The conversation with Crystal Z Campbell took place and words in November 2023. They were in Saint Louis, Oklahoma and Sonia Fernández Pan, the host of this podcast series, was in Berlin. Another thing Crystal mentioned in their conversation: the situation of indirect witness towards so many materials, events, and situations, the acts of omission, the gaps in the narratives. There are still many gaps in the official narratives, but also in our professional stories.