Join host Ned Buskirk in conversation with Korean American writer, artist, and musician Johanna Hedva, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches. Hedva’s practice cooks magic, necromancy, and divination together with mystical states of fury and ecstasy, and political states of solidarity and disintegration. They are devoted to deviant forms of knowledge and to doom as a liberatory condition. There is always the body — its radical permeability, dependency, and consociation — but the task is how to eclipse it, how to nebulize it, and how to cope when this inevitably fails. Whether the form is novels, essays, theory, poetry, music, performance, AI, videogames, installation, sculpture, drawings, or trickery, ultimately Hedva’s work is different kinds of writing because it is different kinds of language embodied: it is words on a page, screaming in a room, dragging a hand through water. Hedva is the author of the novels Your Love Is Not Good and On Hell, as well as Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of poems, performances, and essays. Their artwork has been shown internationally, and their albums are Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House and The Sun and the Moon. Their essay collection, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom, was published in September 2024.

johanna hedva's

Produced by Nick Jaina

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The views expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and do not necessarily represent the views of YG2D.