Promise No Promises!

«The Loving Life of Friendship» is the fourth episode that follows a conversation with poet and researcher Sara Torres. Author of several poetry books, including «La otra genealogía», she also writes for various media and is currently working on her PHD «The Lesbian Text: Fetish, Fantasy and Queer Becomings at Queen Mary University of London.

In one of her texts, «Friendship as a way of life: a culture of the lovers-friends», she begins by mentioning Michel Foucault and his conception of friendship as the center of queer becoming and relationships. What kind of relationships can exist outside the framework of the heterosexual norm? The norms of love make us love from within the norms. And can dangerously lead to love of the norms. With her concept she refers to a third space of relationship based on the encounter and practice of love: the lovers-friends ethic is about understanding that our lovers are our friends and vice versa, and that this ethic is a culture of resistance. It is a third space in a binary world. But betting on this ethic has painful consequences. The fact that relationships cannot be readable produces suffering and discomfort - if it is not monogamous and unconditional, if there is no renunciation and sacrifice, it is not perceived as real love. The realities of love instead should be more realistic. And friendly.

"The Camera that Listens" is the third episode that follows a conversation with artist and filmmaker Alex Reynolds. Her work constantly explores our modes of relation and affection as they appear embodied in the cinematic language. Moreover, her work both produces and is produced by modes of relation and affection through film processes, altering and expanding the narrative structures of cinema and making them more visible to the audience. In Alex Reynolds' films, viewers get invited to enter into stories and situations in a similar way to being invited to play a new game. Many of her films take place on the screen; others are events that cannot be fully seen from the outside because they include the spectator's view by their very presence in the place. Alex’ s projects show that cinema is much more than moving image but instead is a life in motion. At this point the difference between ethics and morality is a distinction making visible the unspoken scripts and narratives that also structure the public sphere of art and culture. "The Camera that Listens" brings up the gazes that filming can make possible, the gazes that inspired her to make films and thus somehow continue the gestures, rhythms and sensorial visuality of other filmmakers.

“Expertise is the new genius" is the second episode that follows a conversation with theorist, DJ and composer Justyna Stasiowska. After completing her degree in Drama and Theater Studies, Justyna Stasiowska is a PhD student at the Performance Studies Department at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. In addition to her theoretical work, contributing to diverse media on theatre and contemporary music, she also collaborates as sound designer with various choreographers.

With "Expertise is the new genius" Justyna encapsulates in a few words a cultural narrative strongly rooted in contemporary music. This narrative gives special relevance to the mastery of technology by musicians, who know their own instruments like no one else does, after years of difficult and painstaking never-ending learning. One keeps feeding the narrative of expertise that, at the same time, offers resistance to being fully achieved. Moreover, the notion of expertise also resonates with a monogamous relationship to sound, in which each musician is the connoisseur, protector and keeper of a very specific type of music that distinguishes them from each other. The cultural logic of specialized expertise means, that, by contrast, a preference for eclecticism is perceived as not very serious, as recreation or as a weak commitment to musical learning.

There are further narratives arising from the patriarchal gaze that are assumed as norm in the field of music. Not only logics of progress and development, of improvement and advancement, are part of the history of sound. Also, the popular use of military concepts applied to the context of sound is very common, especially in the description of albums, songs or concerts. The genealogy of this language goes unnoticed, turning the musician into a sonic warrior. In her sophisticated perception of language, Justyna's definition of noise is not so much about sound as sonic matter per se, but about contextual perception and possible shifts in meaning. This conversation began with the relationship between sound and theatre, questioning the priority of the eye in what happens on stage and in the stalls, and ended by talking about a different kind of relationship to language through dyslexia and its resistance to normative learning sequences. Many other things came in between, including the desire to listen to music producers speak of intuition and the pleasures of the still unidentified.

The podcast Promise No Promises! unfolds a further chapter under the name THE TALE AND THE TONGUE. This series of new episodes arises from conversations between curator and writer Sonia Fernández Pan and guests from different storytelling practices and world-making experiences. For a conversation to take place it is sufficient when two people to start talking to each other. However, conversations are never happening just between two people. A conversation holds many bodies, places, stories and experiences. It develops languages and creates interpersonal and temporary dialects. Sharing is also a way of collectivizing seemingly individual circumstances. Our bodies host many narratives, speaking borrowed words and making stories an important part of who we become. Stories travel between bodies, dwelling in them. Always in motion, they have no end. Words make worlds in which reality and its fictions travel through the tongue to become tales.

SHELTER IN SOUNDS is the first episode that follows a conversation with musician and artist Sarah Badr. This conversation with Sarah Badr took place in mid-February 2021. As a composer, she produces music under the name FRKTL, her experimental solo project active since 2011. Throughout her life Sarah Badr has lived in different cities and has been exposed to different cultural contexts. Music, like smells or tastes, is a time machine. It reactivates the past, but it also awakens possible futures. Composing music for imaginary worlds that only exist in the digital world, as with the Matryoshka Club within Minecraft, is something that ties in with Sarah's long-standing passion for film soundtracks and music videos. Perhaps it is time to start thinking about music beyond the club and the stage.