Promise No Promises!

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.

NOT KNOWING HOW A DEAD LANGUAGE SOUNDED—episode seventeen of the of The Tale and the Tongue series—follows a conversation with multi-media producer, writer, public speaker, educator, audio remixer, DJ, and owner of the Comatonse Recordings record label Terre Thaemlitz, and Sonia Fernández Pan, the host of this podcast series.

The title of this podcast is inspired by a comment that appeared during the meeting with Terre Thaemlitz. She proposed a future in which aspects of the past are unknown as a critical gesture towards the ongoing and growing demand for visibility and preservation of mainstream, but not only, archival systems. Like any other medium, archives and documents produce ideology and are produced by ideology. Following more of Terre Thaemlitz’s comments, this podcast conversation is also not excluded from how criticism of the system is part of the system. Because, as he says, analysis and artistic work is often confused with political organisation. The relational dynamics of gender also emerged in this conversation with Terre Thaemlitz. Like Brigitte Vasallo—author, activist and former guest of the Promise No Promises! podcast series, episode 27 The Monogamy of the System—he is very nuanced about the widespread belief that removing gender from language removes its impact on social realities. On the current situation of gender pronouns, Sonia Fernández Pan also shared with Terre Thaemlitz her thoughts on other uses for the pronoun “they.” Sometimes Sonia Fernández Pan perceives in this pronoun a chance to imply the plurality of the self: “they” in relation to the “I” and not so much to the “she” or “he.” We are often asked to speak in key words that make us less complex than we are. Identity as a comfort zone or final destination contradicts the identity discomfort of so many lives. Being different like others is not the same as being different from others.

Staying with the wonder, is the sixteenth episode of the Tale and the Tongue series. As with Luz Broto, this episode is created through an audio recording exchange by artist Daniela Medina Poch and Sonia Fernández Pan, the host of the Tale and the Tongue podcast series. 

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

STORIES OF FRIENDSHIP is the fifteenth episode that emerged from a conversation with the podcast host Sonia Fernández Pan and the constellating artist-duo and friends Tara Njála Ingvarsdóttir and Silfrun Una Guðlaugsdóttir. They first met on their way to LungA School in Seyðisfjörður, Island, where they were invited to lead two workshops. Seeing Tara and Silla 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. For this podcast episode Sonia Fernández Pan proposed a little play to them: to tell her separately about a memory of their friendship to add to this podcast together. Tara would tell the story of the little bugs, and Silla would return to Athens with Tara, sharing past situations and present emotions that make friendship a living home. Art is for both, Silla and Tara, a space where it is possible to be many other things at the same time. The artist becomes a shape shifter, a temporary identity. 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, talking pipes suppliers or bird-shaped instrument players. Not so long-ago Tara and Silla 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. Performance as an artistic device is a medium that not only allows them to invite many other media, 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.

YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU ARE CREATING SPACE FOR is the fourteenth episode of the Tale and the Tongue series and arises from a conversation with Teesa Bahana, the director of 32° East, an independent non-profit organisation focused on supporting, creating, and exploring contemporary art in Uganda, and the podcast host Sonia Fernández Pan.

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'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». This word refers to a way of doing or not doing, but it is also an ideological subject with different, sometimes contradictory, perspectives. As Teesa 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.