Volia Davydzik

What do the objects we love reveal about the ways we live together?

Drawing on Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Slavoj Žižek, this episode explores how objects of desire, emotional attachments, and material relations shape collective life.

From romantic love and cruel optimism to queer orientations, intra-action, and making kin, we examine how relationships organise our possibilities, sustain our everyday lives, and sometimes prevent us from imagining alternatives.

What happens when we understand collectivity through the attachments, dependencies, and material conditions that make living together possible?

This episode explores the difficulty of translating ordinary experience into political meaning. Starting from migration, academic precarity, and single motherhood, it asks why structural conditions often appear from within as a series of mundane tasks rather than as something politically significant.

The discussion then turns to revolution, Belarus in 2020, to examine how political theory privileges visible events, rupture, leadership, and defeat while often overlooking the infrastructures that sustain collective life: care, communication, mutual aid, memory, and everyday forms of coordination. Through Goya’s Ghosts, Louise Michel, and the figure of the survivor, the episode reflects on revolution as a transformation of relations, perception, and political capacity that may continue long after the public event has been suppressed.

In this episode of Dear Loving Objects, I’m joined by artist Mary Dyja, whose practice works through knitting and crocheting as a way of thinking about the relationship between the body and its environments.

Her work unfolds through slow, repetitive processes and explores how materials, bodies, and micro-environments come into relation — through tension, collaboration, and care. Moving between wearable forms, soft structures, and spatial installations, her practice creates organic, often soft sculptural forms that resemble processes of growth and transformation .

This episode touches on what it means to inhabit space under unstable conditions, and how making can become a way of relating — to materials, to others, and to forms of life that don’t fully settle.

Mary Dyja is currently part of a group exhibition exploring home as a process of arrival, return, and ongoing inhabitation.

Links

https://www.instagram.com/shesaidgallery

https://www.instagram.com/biocrochet/

https://www.instagram.com/vytik_art_collective/

This episode looks at how collective life continues after the 2020 Belarus protests. Through works by Marina Naprushkina, Nadya Sayapina, and Elena Rabkina, it explores collectivity beyond representation — in care, language, and fragmentation.

Silvia Federici — Revolution at Point Zero / writings on reproduction and commons

Jack Halberstam — The Queer Art of Failure

Zoe Leonard — I want a president

Marina Naprushkina

I want a president (2021)

https://marina-naprushkina.de/i-want-a-president-2/

Nadya Sayapina

Dollhouse (2020)

https://cargocollective.com/NadyaSayapina/DOLLHOUSE

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nadyasayapina1411

Elena Rabkina

Belarusian Dream (2024)

https://www.ifa.de/en/blog/article/belarusian-brushstrokes-of-resilience/

https://rabkina.org/

What does it mean to love politically?

In this introductory episode I explain why this podcast exists, what ideas shaped it, and how objects, relations, and care can help us rethink collectivity.