Promise No Promises! 1a314d

“A Place Where There Are Not Words” is episode 27, emerging from one of several encounters with Elin McCready in Tokyo. Besides researching language inside and outside of academia, she's a member of the collectives WAIFU and SLICK. I met Elin during my first few weeks in Japan. I also the nuance Elin made regarding safe spaces. It is not the same to say “a safe space to” or “a safe space from.” She would also tell me that identity politics are one thing and personal interactions are quite another. The way in which these contradict each other is something that comes up in many conversations with friends. It often reminds me of an idea by val flores, which I saw expressed in Tokyo with a vivid image of snow on a cherry blossom tree. We must learn to live with contradictory instructions. Our conversation for this podcast started with the Fueiho Law. It was introduced in 1948 to police nightlife in Japan, banning dancing at specific hours. The club scene in Japan is all about music, as Elin says. Dancing does not mean the same thing in every city, venue or moment in life. A rave is political if its ravers do political action. The same goes for art. Editing the podcast of someone who is so conscious of language, created even more questions. Each voice is a collection of many others. I also believe that we have many voices within us, even contradictory ones. 

“Finding along the way” is episode 26, which follows a conversation with filmmaker Zheng Lu Xinyuan and Sonia Fernández Pan, the host of this podcast series. Xinyuan said she wasn't too worried that Western audiences wouldn't understand her films because they were made for Chinese audiences. Thinking about her comment, Sonia watched some of her films with the feeling of missing something very important due to different cultural sensitivities. Meanwhile, she experienced what we so often feel: the understanding of something without fully comprehending it. Cinema evokes memories and feelings that have been forgotten or hidden for a long time. At the same time, a film can show some emotions while producing different, even contradictory ones.     Sonia’s questions for the interview were more about feelings than cinema-making: how feelings help us to feel belonging. As Xinyuan recounts, belonging can also be a sentient situation in which the body feels pleasure or comfort. When talking about loss of control, anxiety appears. This feeling is also part of the process of making a film. As Xinyuan says, “finding along the way” is what matters when making films.     Following Xinyuan's words, “it should not be artists who are afraid of censorship”. Those who censor are the ones who are afraid, but they this feeling on to those who are censored. It is not only about your own voice but also about those who accompany and you so that your voice can speak and be heard.  

We lost the plot, episode 25 of the Tale and the Tongue podcast series, follows a two-instant conversation with artist Ella C. Bernard and Sonia Fernández Pan, the host of this podcast series. The two speak about the cultural art scene in Berlin and how political identity has almost become more important than artistic practice, patronizing attitudes, censorship and Ella C. Bernard’s personal of having a Nazi grandfather.    While talks a lot about its Nazi past, it tells very little about it. Perhaps because it is often that speaks, not Germans speaking in the first person. Unlike many other Germans, Ella C. Bernard does not hide her personal and emotional connection to the aftermath of Nazism in German society. As she says, taking responsibility starts with speaking in the first person. And doing so without guilt or shame for a past that is given and not chosen. We can try to be critical individuals and not compliant roles within given plots and scripts.     A part of censorship is having to measure our tone and our wording, like it is often the case when talking about Israel and Palestine in . As Sonia Fernández Pan says, she feels that moral arrogance, among many other things, is also part of the puzzle. Meanwhile, Ella C. Bernard is critical of the state's manipulation of both concepts: culture and remembrance.     “Listening to Ella talk about her relationship with art, I wonder if the same thing is happening to art that happened to : that we repeat an official narrative that is not really ours.”  —Sonia Fernández Pan 

A point of , a common ground is episode 24, following a conversation with music journalist, booking agent, event promoter and translator Yuko Asanuma. In the last few years, I have seen Yuko in different places in Berlin, often in music-related environments but not only. Yuko Asanuma says, the places where we are willing to go to, we recognize each other as part of a different type of community. Although there may be music, it is something else that brings us together.  I attended the first “Setten” series of events, part of the agency Yuko Asanuma runs. Setten is a Japanese word meaning both “point of ” and “common ground”. It is also an invitation for people to meet and amplify each other. There is something slippery about partying, about being together in one place at one time. Even when all the elements seem to be perfect, we may not feel fully present. Other times, unexpectedly, we feel totally connected in places where we don't seem to belong. As Yuko states, you can't really anticipate the energy that an event will create. While most of the institutional and mainstream cultural contexts remain silent, it is in other venues that the most relevant things and conversations are happening. And here I understand relevance as a question of common struggles and ethics in times of censorship and escalating state violence.

Where does from scratch start? is episode 23, which developed after a conversation with artist Jesse Darling. While I believe that ideas are never entirely our own, there is something very personal in how we express them. Especially when they are ed by life stories, as in Jesse's case. Following Jesse's words during our conversation, the things we do or think come mostly from life experiences. Listening to Jesse, it does not seem accidental how capitalism keeps us strategically busy and tired. Yet, we keep imagining and doing, with what we have and with what we don't have. Perhaps the question is not only how we work, but for what or who we work for. A question I asked Jesse was when does "from scratch" start? The com is the search for an origin, a beginning, or a starting point. But when the source is multiple, a single origin is quite impossible. 

Inhabiting a Tongue Together is the twenty-second episode of The Tale and the Tongue podcast series. It is a conversation with artist Iz Öztat, driven by the curiosity to learn more about Iz and Zişan, Iz’s close collaborator and her alter ego, a ghost she encounters from time to time.    As I got to know Zişan better, a sense of time travel came over me. Every episode of her life is a place of struggle, yet also confidence and desire. To follow Zişan brings you to places and times that we have not lived: the Ottoman Empire, the European avant-garde, the memory of the waters of the Danube, the love between women writers in the 1920s... Thanks to Iz Öztat, Zişan makes the past happen differently. The present is a slippery time. It can move us backward and forwards at the same time. The spirit of the Avant-garde of the last century, promoting European modernity, is not so far removed from our present. The relevance of artistic practices is still decided from the same places, even if their actors come from different locations. And it is here that Zişan appears to challenge and be part of an avant-garde that made Europe the centre of attention. When asking Iz for a different way to introduce Zişan, she would go back to the title of this series. They tell a story inhabiting a tongue together. But this tongue speaks different languages.   

Getting Along with Discomfort is episode twenty-one of The Tale and the Tongue podcast series, which follows a conversation with curator and researcher Rita Ouédraogo on the importance of conversation and exchanges in processes and learning to get along with discomfort.   Honesty, something that Rita Ouédraogo brings to our conversation, allows us to know what we can do and where we stand. Many misunderstandings in processes come from not explaining from the start what the conditions and intentions of the projects we work on are. Making them available provides a better understanding of the given structures in which we can work but cannot change. As she says, listening is an essential part of conversation. Discomfort is something that Rita relates to many of her experiences, from different positions and meanings. Far from being a stable place, discomfort is a situation that arises, that morphs, and that never quite goes away. What's more, for Rita it can become a curatorial strategy. Acknowledging that discomfort exists, is knowing how to listen to it when it appears. 

EVERY GESTURE COUNTS, HOWEVER SMALL, is the 20th episode of the “Tale and the Tongue” podcast series. Full of intimate moments, Sonia Fernández Pan exchanged thoughts over months with Karolina Grzywnowicz, talking about plants, migration, activism and much more. “Dear Karolina,  The cuttings of the plants you gave me are taking root in water. I put them on a windowsill so that they are closer to the sun. It is quite telling that plants, which apparently don't move from their place, make you travel so much. But as you say, plants are not as native as they appear to be in many places. How a landscape can be a crime scene and a place full of concealed violence, to borrow your words, reminds me of how the forests of my childhood did not exist in my grandparents' childhood...  This podcast also relates to this moment: a shared need to meet and talk. Especially, when many want us to be silent, detached, and indifferent….  A feminist collective called for the need to talk about trees, connecting many, many feminist struggles around the world. As they say, to talk about trees is to talk about colonialism, extractivism, and injustice... I pause my words here, always curious to hear more stories from you. Take care, and water. Sonia ” 

MOVING IN MIGRANT RHYTHMS is episode nineteen, which follows a conversation with artist and loud thinker Maya Saravia and the podcast host Sonia Fernández Pan. In their conversation the migrant experience is very present. Maya has lived in different cities since she left Guatemala, including Madrid, Lisbon and Berlin. Even if we are the same person, our bodies do not move in the same way in all places and cultures. Part of the insights Maya and Sonia share have a lot to do with feeling and thinking with other rhythms. One of the music genres that Maya often talks about is raggaeton. The raggaeton rhythms are dangerously catchy. It is one of those music rhythms whose will is stronger than ours. In the statement of one of her projects, she refers to raggaeton as a syncretic event. It is a volcano erupting in the world, driven by the flows of capital, labour, many displacements and musical traditions. Another of her projects, El Olvido, starts in a bar in Guatemala. She says it's a bar that could be anywhere in the world. A place where the light-hearted life of bars mixes with the violence of the news. Violence always makes words fall short. Making things happen is usually the attitude of people who see art as a way, and not so much as a destination. It is not about the destination or following a course, but about how one thing leads to another; it is not only important to move, but to create conditions for movement. Perhaps that is the most magical thing about conversations, that they move us without intending to.

HOW CAN A FORM BE A HOLDER FOR INTENTIONS AND IDEAS is episode eighteen, following a conversation with multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer Crystal Z Campbell. While form is one of the meaning-making elements in art, it can be often overlooked. Crystal Z Campbell, who furthermore refers to attention as a form of care, shaped formal relevance from a question: how can a form be a holder, a vessel, for intentions and ideas? In Crystal's work, which combines the specifics of historical events with the abstraction of artistic gestures and the serendipity of processes, form can be felt in many ways. Crystal's films are temporary places to enter and engage in a sensory relationship with the stories they make present. The witnessing relationship is also central to Crystal Z Campbell's work. Looking is not only a biological process, but also a historical one. They wonder in a public conversation: “How do we look at things we can't see?” Following Crystal's words, "looking should not be easy". Precisely when things are easy, our attention remains strategically distracted elsewhere, looking without seeing what is in front of us. The conversation with Crystal Z Campbell took place and words in November 2023. They were in Saint Louis, Oklahoma and Sonia Fernández Pan, the host of this podcast series, was in Berlin. Another thing Crystal mentioned in their conversation: the situation of indirect witness towards so many materials, events, and situations, the acts of omission, the gaps in the narratives. There are still many gaps in the official narratives, but also in our professional stories.

NOT KNOWING HOW A DEAD LANGUAGE SOUNDED is episode seventeen of the series, which follows a conversation with multi-media producer, writer, public speaker, educator, audio remixer, DJ and owner of the Comatonse Recordings record label Terre Thaemlitz, and Sonia Fernández Pan, the host of this podcast series. The title of this podcast is inspired by a comment that appeared during the meeting with Terre. She proposed a future in which aspects of the past are unknown as a critical gesture towards the ongoing and growing demand for visibility and preservation of mainstream, but not only, archival systems. Like any other medium, archives and documents produce ideology and are produced by ideology. Following more of Terre's comments, this podcast conversation is also not excluded from how criticism of the system is part of the system. Because, as he says, analysis and artistic work is often confused with political organisation. The relational dynamics of gender also emerged in this conversation with Terre Thaemlitz. Like Brigitte Vasallo, he is very nuanced about the widespread belief that removing gender from language removes its impact on social realities. On the current situation of gender pronouns, Sonia also shared with Terre her thoughts on other uses for the pronoun "they”. Sometimes Sonia perceives in this pronoun a chance to imply the plurality of the self. The “they” in relation to the “I” and not so much to the “she” or “he”. We are often asked to speak in key words that make us less complex than we are. Identity as a comfort zone or final destination contradicts the identity discomfort of so many lives. Being different like others is not the same as being different from others.

Staying with the wonder, is the sixteenth episode of the Tale and the Tongue series. As with Luz Broto, this episode is created through an audio recording exchange by artist Daniela Medina Poch and Sonia Fernández Pan, the host of the Tale and the Tongue podcast series.    Dear Daniela, I have been collecting bottle caps these days to keep bringing the sea closer to this marshy city. Yesterday I brought back several from a long journey to reach a lake, as well as some strange, very hard mushrooms growing on the trunks of some trees. Curiosity makes us eavesdrop and intrusive, diverts us from the straight and narrow, makes us perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary, even makes us change our minds. Do you think curiosity is a crossing point between seeking and finding? I feel it is an indispensable attitude to stay with the wonder, an idea of yours that is much more than an idea. It is perhaps a way of being in the world, an unstable position that makes and unmakes given realities. Someone told me that curiosity was a type of youth. And I think that if you stay with the wonder, you age youthfully. In starting to write this letter, which is for you, but also for anyone who wants to listen to us through your voice, I was trying to recall things I said to you in my voice notes but not doing so keeps the secret. However, it is not the mystery of my stories that is important here, but the possibility of not telling something or of telling it half-heartedly. Not knowing everything stops being uncomfortable and becomes a way to stay with the wonder. I stop here, a bit suddenly. A summer storm has just started. Perhaps these drops bring to Berlin the waters of so many rivers that are important to you. See you in the future to share flavors, wishes and stories. In the meantime, enjoy the unknown very much.   Yours, Sonia

STORIES OF FRIENDSHIP is the fifteenth episode that emerged from a conversation with the podcast host Sonia Fernández Pan and the constellating artist-duo and friends Tara Njála Ingvarsdóttir and Silfrun Una Guðlaugsdóttir. They first met on their way to LungA School in Seyðisfjörður, Island, where they were invited to lead two workshops. Seeing Tara and Silla being dressed alike, giving two different characters to the same piece of clothing, gave a glimpse to something that is very present in their work as artists: the way in which everyday life and art can become friends. For this podcast episode Sonia Fernández Pan proposed a little play to them: to tell her separately about a memory of their friendship to add to this podcast together. Tara would tell the story of the little bugs, and Silla would return to Athens with Tara, sharing past situations and present emotions that make friendship a living home. Art is for both, Silla and Tara, a space where it is possible to be many other things at the same time. The artist becomes a shape shifter, a temporary identity. This way of doing things has enabled them to become waterproof gallerists, heads of a company providing apology , emotional dinner party hosts, hairdressers for naughty hairstyles, talking pipes suppliers or bird-shaped instrument players. Not so long-ago Tara and Silla got married in blue, celebrating their friendship and their constellating life together. The wedding included a contract in which they signed a piece of advice that someone gave them: to put friendship first. Performance as an artistic device is a medium that not only allows them to invite many other media, but also lets them play with the framework as themselves. Stories of friendship are important and inspiring for many reasons, not least because they also make friends out of stories.

YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU ARE CREATING SPACE FOR is the fourteenth episode of the Tale and the Tongue series and arises from a conversation with Teesa Bahana, the director of 32° East, an independent non-profit organisation focused on ing, creating, and exploring contemporary art in Uganda, and the podcast host Sonia Fernández Pan. Music would appear at the beginning of their conversation, sharing together impressions of music's sensory ability to touch our emotions by bodily listening. The sensory dimension is something that music shares with artistic practices. However, there is a tendency to privilege its conceptual dimension, to locate art in the mind and not in the entire body. Being inspired by talking to other people is a kind of gift we receive, often without looking for it. In friendly conversations, ideas often come up that help us to shape or follow directions. They are part of a network that includes serendipities, spontaneity, and the pleasure in encountering each other. To borrow Teesa's words, the possibility of creating a community involves a common language and knowing how to relate to each other across differences. Another common term in the art context is «professional». This word refers to a way of doing or not doing, but it is also an ideological subject with different, sometimes contradictory, perspectives. As Teesa points out, the critique of the term must take into who is professional by default and who is not, who can ignore prescribed conventions and who cannot. The title of this podcast, «You Never Know What You Are Creating Space For», is inspired by a comment from Teesa Bahana during the conversation that brings up unintentional yet essential situations when working: making space for the unexpected and paying attention to things that happen and we can sense without planning them.

“To Move a Conversation,” is the thirteenth episode of the Tale and the Tongue series. It is a very special on—created through an audio recording exchange over months by artist Luz Broto and Sonia Fernández Pan, the host of the Tale and the Tongue podcast series. “Dear Luz, I am writing to you from my room in Berlin, where the first prominent sun of the year amuses itself by appearing and disappearing. A window that opens becomes a door. A door for a breath of fresh air and an internal change of scenery, as in my case. I kept listening to you, this time with the whole conversation in my ears, feeling two sources of light: that of sun and yours. I find it very telling that your name in Spanish means light. Barcelona’s nights have always been bright for me. And there are places where darkness goes beyond night, reaching into long summer days. As I also told you, snow and ice teach you that walking in a straight line can be very dangerous. You can be very clear about a direction to follow, but not about its path. Something like that happens to me with this letter I am writing to you after our spoken letters. We gave it a name: “Moving a Conversation.” And we came up with a little method: to move around spaces that were related to your projects. You in Barcelona, me in Berlin. I think we found a way to go back to the past by walking into the future. Thank you very much my dear, for moving me around, for taking me to so many places elsewhere, for making space for me among your words.”

I Eat Here, the first episode of the series Songs to Sound Worlds Stories to Rewrite Them, is based on a talk by Haitian artist Tessa Mars. In her painting and performance practice she proposes storytelling and image-making as transformative strategies for survival, resistance, and healing. Her work is centered around Tessalines, her hybrid alter ego based on the leader of the Haitian revolution, Jean-Jacques Dessalines; through her, Mars investigates gender, history, tradition, and narrative.   The podcast series Songs to Sound Worlds Stories to Rewrite Them emerges from the autumn 2022 Master Symposium at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW, moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer, ed by SüdKulturfonds. The symposium was devoted to artists and thinkers whose work addresses the importance of retelling and reinterpreting stories and myths that regard identity and gender with all their ecological and spectral entanglements intact. TThe podcast series features talks and performances by Jumana Emil Abboud, Bani Abidi, Christian Campbell, Astrit Ismaili, Acaye Kerunen, Tessa Mars, and Kara Springer.

Inheritance, the second episode of the series Songs to Sound Worlds Stories to Rewrite Them, is based on a talk by Pakistani artist Bani Abidi. Bani Abidi studied painting and printmaking at the National College of Arts, in Lahore, and later attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work addresses, in part, forms of nationalism amid the Indian-Pakistani conflict and the violent legacy of partition.   The podcast series Songs to Sound Worlds Stories to Rewrite Them emerges from the autumn 2022 Master Symposium at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW, moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer, ed by SüdKulturfonds. The symposium was devoted to artists and thinkers whose work addresses the importance of retelling and reinterpreting stories and myths that regard identity and gender with all their ecological and spectral entanglements intact. TThe podcast series features talks and performances by Jumana Emil Abboud, Bani Abidi, Christian Campbell, Astrit Ismaili, Acaye Kerunen, Tessa Mars, and Kara Springer.

Feathers, the third episode of the series Songs to Sound Worlds Stories to Rewrite Them, is based on a talk by Palestinian artist Jumana Emil Abboud. Her artistic practice constellates personal stories and collective mythologies, weaving folklore and contemporary tales to navigate themes of memory and dispossession. Employing drawing, video, performance, objects, and text, she surveys place and resilience amidst the topography of Palestine.   The podcast series Songs to Sound Worlds Stories to Rewrite Them emerges from the autumn 2022 Master Symposium at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW, moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer, ed by SüdKulturfonds. The symposium was devoted to artists and thinkers whose work addresses the importance of retelling and reinterpreting stories and myths that regard identity and gender with all their ecological and spectral entanglements intact. TThe podcast series features talks and performances by Jumana Emil Abboud, Bani Abidi, Christian Campbell, Astrit Ismaili, Acaye Kerunen, Tessa Mars, and Kara Springer.

Kiss, the fourth episode of the series Songs to Sound Worlds Stories to Rewrite Them, is based on a talk with Christian Campbell, a Trinidadian Bahamian poet, essayist, and cultural critic who studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and received his PhD from Duke University. He is the author of Running the Dusk (2010), which won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. In 2015 Running the Dusk was translated into Spanish and published in Cuba as Correr el Crepúsculo.   The podcast series Songs to Sound Worlds Stories to Rewrite Them emerges from the autumn 2022 Master Symposium at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW, moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer, ed by SüdKulturfonds. The symposium was devoted to artists and thinkers whose work addresses the importance of retelling and reinterpreting stories and myths that regard identity and gender with all their ecological and spectral entanglements intact. TThe podcast series features talks and performances by Jumana Emil Abboud, Bani Abidi, Christian Campbell, Astrit Ismaili, Acaye Kerunen, Tessa Mars, and Kara Springer.

Shapes, the fifth episode of the series Songs to Sound Worlds Stories to Rewrite Them, is based on a talk by artist and performer Astrid Ismaili, born in Kosovo and based in Amsterdam. Their artistic practice features bodies that consist of both imaginary and material realities, using alter egos, body extensions, and wearable music instruments to embody possibilities for becoming. In the act of singing, they explore the role of voice in pop culture and identity politics, asking what it means to make audible a body politic.   The podcast series Songs to Sound Worlds Stories to Rewrite Them emerges from the autumn 2022 Master Symposium at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW, moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer, ed by SüdKulturfonds. The symposium was devoted to artists and thinkers whose work addresses the importance of retelling and reinterpreting stories and myths that regard identity and gender with all their ecological and spectral entanglements intact. TThe podcast series features talks and performances by Jumana Emil Abboud, Bani Abidi, Christian Campbell, Astrit Ismaili, Acaye Kerunen, Tessa Mars, and Kara Springer.