Promise No Promises!

ETHNICITY by Ashfika Rahman, a visual artist from Dhaka, Bangladesh, whose work straddles visual art and documentary practices, is the fifth episode of the podcast series Seeing Into the Heart of Things; Earth and Equality Within Indigenous and Ancestral Knowledges. This collection of episodes emerged from the Master Symposium in fall 2021, at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW in collaboration with CULTURESCAPES 2021 Amazonia.

The contributions to the symposium were devoted to discussing Indigenous thought, decolonial feminisms, and the political possibilities of the mythic imagination, raising questions like: How do Indigenous cosmologies create forms for resistance? How does the Western imaginary of the Amazon, from its roots in racial capitalism to its corporate-tech, paternalistic present, cloud our understanding of how its peoples and nonhuman spirits narrate themselves?

DEPRESSION by theater and film writer and director Pauliina Feodoroff, is the fourth episode of the podcast series Seeing Into the Heart of Things; Earth and Equality Within Indigenous and Ancestral Knowledges. This collection of episodes emerged from the Master Symposium in fall 2021, at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW in collaboration with CULTURESCAPES 2021 Amazonia.

The contributions to the symposium were devoted to discussing Indigenous thought, decolonial feminisms, and the political possibilities of the mythic imagination, raising questions like: How do Indigenous cosmologies create forms for resistance? How does the Western imaginary of the Amazon, from its roots in racial capitalism to its corporate-tech, paternalistic present, cloud our understanding of how its peoples and nonhuman spirits narrate themselves?

WHAT HAPPENS TO THE LAND, HAPPENS TO THE PEOPLE by Katya García-Antón, Director and Chief Curator of the Office of Contemporary Art Norway, in Oslo, is the third episode of the podcast series Seeing Into the Heart of Things; Earth and Equality Within Indigenous and Ancestral Knowledges.

This collection of episodes emerged from the Master Symposium in fall 2021, at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW in collaboration with CULTURESCAPES 2021 Amazonia.

The contributions to the symposium were devoted to discussing Indigenous thought, decolonial feminisms, and the political possibilities of the mythic imagination, raising questions like: How do Indigenous cosmologies create forms for resistance? How does the Western imaginary of the Amazon, from its roots in racial capitalism to its corporate-tech, paternalistic present, cloud our understanding of how its peoples and nonhuman spirits narrate themselves?

EXTRACTION by Jeremy Narby, a Switzerland-based writer, activist, and anthropologist, is the second episode of the podcast series Seeing Into the Heart of Things; Earth and Equality Within Indigenous and Ancestral Knowledges.

This collection of episodes emerged from the Master Symposium in fall 2021, at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW in collaboration with CULTURESCAPES 2021 Amazonia.

The contributions to the symposium were devoted to discussing Indigenous thought, decolonial feminisms, and the political possibilities of the mythic imagination, raising questions like: How do Indigenous cosmologies create forms for resistance? How does the Western imaginary of the Amazon, from its roots in racial capitalism to its corporate-tech, paternalistic present, cloud our understanding of how its peoples and nonhuman spirits narrate themselves?

CONNECTION by Vandria Borari, Brazilian artist and activist from the Borari people of Baixo Tapajós, Brazil, is the first episode of the podcast series Seeing Into the Heart of Things; Earth and Equality Within Indigenous and Ancestral Knowledges.

This collection of episodes emerged from the Master Symposium in fall 2021, at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW in collaboration with CULTURESCAPES 2021 Amazonia.

The contributions to the symposium were devoted to discussing Indigenous thought, decolonial feminisms, and the political possibilities of the mythic imagination, raising questions like: How do Indigenous cosmologies create forms for resistance? How does the Western imaginary of the Amazon, from its roots in racial capitalism to its corporate-tech, paternalistic present, cloud our understanding of how its peoples and nonhuman spirits narrate themselves?

Birds and cats is the ninth episode that follows a conversation with artist Laure Prouvost. The title of this podcast stems from one of the first questions Sonia Fernández Pan, the curator of this podcast asked Laure Prouvost during the conversation, inspired by the multiple characters Laure embodies through her projects. Her answer to the question about who she would like to be if she wasn't herself was "a bird", commenting on this animal's ability to fly. Sonia added that she would like to be a cat, perhaps because one of its great talents is the daily right to laziness in a world where life works relentlessly. They ended the conversation by returning to our animal relationship as bird and cat, with Laure flirting with the possibility that one catches and eats the other.

In the many biographies that Laure Prouvost has written about herself over the years the artist strays from traditional artist biographies, describing her work according to the narrative and experiential drive of her projects and her way of naming them to ones where the institutional curriculum is replaced by a list of situations that her projects were able to create: Melting Into Another, an Occupied Paradise, Deep See Blue Surrounding You, a Waiting Room with objects, a New Museum for Grand Dad, A tearoom for Grand Ma, a lobby for love among the artists… Within these places we are no longer an impersonal audience, but characters who enter temporal worlds where fiction becomes materially present and real.

The difference between fiction and lying is a question Sonia Fernández Pan also shared with Laure Prouvost, inspired by how she never fully reveals what is fiction and what is not in her work. The storytelling surrounding her artistic practice is another element of her work, strategically confusing spheres that the traditional art system insists on keeping apart.

This conversation with Laure Prouvost took place in April 2022 in separate places. Sonia Fernández Pan was listening to Laure Prouvosts words from the computer and paying attention to the sound of the strokes of a drawing that Laure brought into their meeting. There are many similarities between writing and drawing. Both arise from the body; both produce a physical and intimate relationship between head and hands. The strokes of Laure's drawing added sound textures to her words. To listen to her voice and strokes, come in and enjoy.

When body becomes feeling, the third episode of Feminisms in the Caribbean series, arises from a conversation with the choreographer and performer Marily Gallardo. Teacher in Afro Antillean dance, she is also founder and organiser of Kalalú Danza, Afro Caribbean Cultural Research and Creative Action Lab in Santo Domingo. To Marily Gallardo it is fundamental to recognize the body as the first territory, as the most important place to construct the experience of life. This is because the body is also a denied territory, inhabited by social disciplines, above all for women. Marily Gallardo’s work is a constant affirmation practice of the body, individual, collective and communitarian at the same time.

The changeful history of the colonization of the Caribbean has left deep scars that are still present today. This is best known by artists and cultural practitioners who work in their own way on an identity of its own for the Antilles. The term “Caribbean” here is used primarily in a geographical sense to help overcoming local antagonisms between different political systems, languages, and cultures, while allowing artists of all origins to exchange ideas and thus work together on a Caribbean identity.

This series of podcasts aims to engage with a plurality of voices from different backgrounds to think with them on the diversity implicit in the notion of identity.