(Un)Box the Soap Podcast

In this episode of (Un)Box the Soap Podcast we will take you on a journey through magic, herbal medicine, tarot cards, and other witchy things! We had the pleasure to talk with Lara Senske (@cosmia.absurd), a professional tarot card reader and a drag performer, and Fedora Boonaert, art historian and designer who specializes in herbs and scents.

Witches have been, and still are, everywhere, but for this episode we wanted to look at their practice in Amsterdam - how did they get enchanted by witchcraft? Are they part of a bigger community? What are their areas of interest and expertise? And how does a witch navigate the modern world? 

Fedora will discuss her research on herbal medicine, witch hunts, women's knowledge, institutions, modern healthcare, while Lara will share her insight into the history of tarot cards, their designs, and how they circulate within modern cultures.

We invite you to get immersed in this fascinating conversation, and delve deeper into the world of witches and magic!

You can find our guests on Instagram:

Lara Senske: @cosmia.absurd

Fedora Boonaert: @fedorabonaert 

And read Fedora’s amazing article which we discuss in the episode:

https://thecouch.hethem.nl/are-tiktok-healers-contemporary-quacks-or-re-risen-witches/. 

In our second episode of (Un)box the Soap Podcast, we continue our journey through the swamps and examine how this porous ecosystem manifests in culture. 

Whether it's through watching the film La Ciénaga, listening to swamp-pop, walking through the streets of London, or examining the history of the Great Dismal Swamp Maroons, we explore the swamp’s potentiality of creating new meanings, seeing ordinary things anew, and reclaiming one’s independence.

Why do we associate swamps with something negative and why is it Shrek that helps us free ourselves from these presuppositions? 

Join us in our boggy ruminations and let’s submerge in the swampy realms!

Works we referenced and cited in this episode:

Hello and welcome to the first episode of the (Un)Box the Soap Podcast!

Anticipating the release of the fifth edition of our journal, we would like to invite you to the realm of swamps. How does the swamp speak? What can we hear when we tune in to its sounds? What are the things we can learn about and from the swamp, and how can it inform ourselves, as well as the world we inhabit? Can our engagement with the often-neglected wetlands provide an alternative to the city spatio-temporalities and offer an antidote to our own sense of feeling ‘swamped’?

These and many more questions we explore in an interview with Dominika and Iulia, who are the founders of the fieldfictions collective. Accompanied by their soundpiece project “ecotonal tones; eventually everything is swamp”, we hope to take you on the journey through the zones of transition: the world-making processes of forested wetlands.