Moving Through Layers of Internet is Episode 32, of The Tale and The Tongue, which follows a conversation with artist Martins Kohout and Sonia Fernández Pan, the host of this podcast.

“On my way to Martins' house with a recorder from another era, I felt my phone vibrate. Checking to see if there were any messages, there were none. As we were going to talk about technology, this moment became a reminder of common situations with our devices in daily life. I asked Martins to share a personal anecdote about technology that they found relevant. Rather than the appealing myth of eye-opening discoveries, Martins chose to talk about intensities and gradual shifts in our technological habits.

The promised world beyond the screen is often not as exciting as we imagined it would be. But the phone is always there for us, ready to comfort us and keep the dopamine flowing… The past is constantly being updated too. Just like with the apps on our phones, it’s very easy to forget about the older versions. This is something Martins reminded me of during a meeting that focused more on how we use things than on how they are made.

Our communication methods are not mutually exclusive; they all work together. Just as we don’t speak in the same way to everyone we know or in the different languages we know, we don’t express ourselves in the same way across all the media we use. Following Martins’s observations, this points to a contradiction: demanding that a single social media profile encapsulates who we really are, when actually we are many at once. But I don’t think this is just because of technology.”

Sonia Fernández Pan

We Could Not Resist That Call is episode 31 of The Tale and The Tongue, which follows a conversation Laurence Rassel, a “cyberfeminist” and Sonia Fernández Pan, the host of this podcast.

“I saw Laurence at Feministaldia in San Sebastián at the end of 2025. She talked about something she calls an open-source institution. Just as we should understand the machines we use by opening them up and seeing what they are made of, we should open institutions to understand how they really work.

The question of privilege came up in conversation with Laurence Rassel. Summarizing certain forms of dissent as a privilege is also a way of dismissing the fact that we still have some agency in what we do. Not everyone understands success in the same way, nor does everyone share the same motivations or aspirations. Persisting in these differences is important, precisely to avoid a monopoly of desire.

This conversation with Laurence Rassel took place at the end of January 2026. I suggested a trip back in time, to how things were in the 1990s with regard to the internet and the promises of technology. At the end of our meeting, we returned once again to 2003. “I don’t want to be alone in the 21st century,” is something Laurence said back then. Now that we know how lonely we can be while being hyper-connected, perhaps it is time to keep returning to the past — not out of nostalgia for what has been lost, but for what we can still recover."

Sonia Fernández Pan

We are very happy to announce The Globe is Going to the Moon, episode 100 of the podcast series Promise No Promises! and episode 30 of The Tale and the Tongue series. It follows a conversation between Yuko Mohri, an installation artist focusing on “events” that constantly shift according to the environment’s conditions and Sonia Fernández Pan, the host of this podcast series.

During my stay in Tokyo, I went to the Artizon Museum with a friend. There we experienced On Physis, an exhibition by Yuko Mohri with artists who appear to be alive even though they are not. I remember the playful movement of Yuko Mohri’s pieces, as well as breaking the rules by taking videos when it was forbidden…

I really liked Yuko Mohri’s way of telling stories and the fact that her words included brackets to express her laughs between questions and answers. Drawing on the artist’s ideas, I cannot help but think that our work is a manifestation of what we were or what we would like to be—even when what we do, does not explicitly speak about us, as in the case of Yuko Mohri and many artists I admire.

Yuko Mohri’s work Moré Moré Tokyo (Leaky Tokyo) also made me feel connected to her. I sensed what I call “unconscious or unaware communities.” They are made of people who do not know each other but who have things in common.

We talked about her relationship with music, invisible forces, electricity, Osaka, her recent exhibitions, Akihabara, Instagram, Venice, how she became an artist, and teaching during the pandemic.

“The In-Between” is episode 29 of The Tale and the Tongue podcast series. It emerged from several exchanges between Mafe Moscoso, writer, researcher, and anthropology professor at BAU, College of Arts and Design of Barcelona, and former fellow at CAPAS at Universität Heidelberg, and Sonia Fernández Pan, host of this podcast series.

“Dear Mafe,

Starting from the end – one of our many in-betweens – I’ll answer your question: what was I doing when I was five years old? Like you, I was moving for the first time. I was starting to become Galician—to my great regret at the time. I was sad to realize I would not be Basque. Like you, I didn’t like the change. Just like a plant uprooted against its will, that’s how I felt.

The word “in-between,” which keeps resurfacing in our conversations, was already there in 2023—and even before that. I remember how central that idea was in your project for Hangar, for the way it connects to the mestizo. Mestizo is a word that carries your voice to me. Something I had forgotten is that the word “entremedio” in German was the title of a project I did with Lucrecia Dalt at the Lilly Reich and Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona. She chose it back then, still living in Berlin: Dazwischen.

Sometimes I miss the life without fear or worry that art residencies make possible. I felt at home because, for the first time in a long while, I felt safe. But you define it much better: to live the life of an inheritor. Does that happen to you with Heidelberg? Do you still miss that quiet life? Or perhaps the present demands so much from us now that there’s little time left for longing.

your dear Pan”

“To Stir the Desire for Something Else” is episode 28, that emerged from multiple exchanges with poet and researcher María Salgado and Sonia Fernández Pan.

“Dear María,

I was told many times that poetry is something physical. I didn't get it from reading books. I think I got it when I saw you on stage with Fran Cabeza de Vaca.

Years ago, you called poetry a vampire, and I also feel that it's like a ghost. Poetry is present in many places that are not poems. I often wonder what poetry is. It's not just short lines and books with lots of white space. There are poets in contemporary art, but contemporary art is not exactly a friend of brief, clear ideas. To use short sentences, you need to know exactly what you want to say. I really like the idea that poetry is a kind of vampire that runs through different eras. As you say, the fact of having to survive for thousands of years, but keeping a certain essence, has made poetry “to lose world”…

Inspired by the things you said, these past few weeks I have started collecting phrases by my friends. I wanted to add them to this podcast with my voice. But I am not sure yet. In editing, as you well know, it is possible to delete and change the order of ideas. Over the years, I have understood that editing is as much about what you do to someone's voice as it is about what you don't do. Content is one thing, meaning is another. How they merge, it’s still a mystery to me.

Auf WiederUmarmen, as I like to say in German.”

“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.