«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.

Promise No Promises!

THE TALE AND THE TONGUE. The Loving Life of Friendship

"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.

THE TALE AND THE TONGUE. The Camera that Listens

“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 TALE AND THE TONGUE. Expertise is the new genius

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. 

THE TALE AND THE TONGUE. Shelter in Sounds

  The second episode of the series "Feminisms in the Caribbean", Writing in Hiatuses, is the result of an epistolary conversation through audio notes and emails with writer Marta Aponte Alsina. A storyteller, novelist and literary critic, Marta Aponte wrote her novel “La muerte feliz de William Carlos Williams” (The Happy Death of William Carlos Williams) out of a desire to write a book that she herself wanted to read. This novel, published in 2015, brings up fundamental issues in Marta Aponte's writing, such as the gaze of the foreigner, the extended ties of Puerto Rican culture, the rewriting of canonical texts, and womxn's voices.   Her first novel “Angélica Furiosa”, published in 1994, revives the figure of the witch and spiritism to explore Puerto Rican history from the margins and anti-colonial narratives. As an author of several novels and short stories, Marta Aponte is also prolific in essay writing, with titles such as “Somos Somos islas: ensayos de camino” (We Are Islands: Essays on the Road), published also 2015. As she herself wonders with her latest novel “PR3 Aguirre” (2018) in relation to the gaze of the one who writes: “Or do we write to map, to explore tributaries, to invade archives, to steal knowledge, to cannibalize the literature of the lords, to snatch the privilege of authorship from the one who wrote us in his own way, the better to cross us out?” This podcast is part of the public program of the past show, “one month after being known in this island” curated by @yinajimenezs and @paguardiola by @caribbeanartinitiative, thanks to the support of @kbhg, Basel. 

Feminisms in the Caribbean. Writing in Hiatuses

Womxn in Motion: The fourth Master symposium in the series Women in the Arts and Leadership, on October 7 and 8, 2020, at the Art Institute at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel was dedicated to ideas and iterations of performance, and to the way in which its embodied practices—its bodies—are often framed or received by narrow notions not only of gender, race, class, geography, technology, and temporality, but of what performance itself means and entails: a body in motion, for example. Whose body, though, and what kind of movement? Movement, indeed, is always both, suggesting something singular—a body in tender, private effort—and something collective.Presence, proximity, voice, movement, and performative relations are the tools by which many contemporary artists, in unprecedented ways, continue to explore how to create equitable space for our ever-regulated, dully delimited bodies. This symposium served those practices, examining how performance has become the means by which so many artists and thinkers reflect on and denounce political systems that foster inequity, violence, and binary relations at their core. Our various guests made explicit this set of relations—between singularity and collectivity, authenticity and performativity, a language of narrativity both visual and linguistic, movement both physical and intellectual. The complicated desire to perform for others and with others, and to read such performances correctly, was a recurring idea and impulse of the Womxn in Motion symposium, as it continued with performances, conversations, screenings, and readings by artists, thinkers, poets, filmmakers, composers, and teachers—performers all—including Kat Anderson, Julieta Aranda, Barbara Casavecchia, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Pan Daijing, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Ingela Ihrman, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Bhanu Kapil, Lynne Kouassi, Isabel Lewis, Tessa Mars, Sonia Fernández Pan, Sadie Plant, and Martina-Sofie Wildberger.ScreamersThis episode is based on a panel discussion with Chus Martínez, Quinn Latimer, Sonia Fernández Pan, Martina-Sofie Wildberger, and Barabara Casavecchia. Sonia Fernández Pan is a (in)dependent curator who researches and writes through art and, since 2011, is the author of esnorquel, a personal project in the form of an online archive with podcasts, texts, and written conversations. She currently hosts the podcast series Feminism Under Corona and Corona Under the Ocean produced by the Art Institute and TBA21–Academy.Martina-Sofie Wildberger is a performance artist working on the power of language, alternative ways of communicating, and the relationship between scribality and orality. Central to her practice is sound, the articulation of words, and the meanings constituted in the act of speaking as well as the poetic quality of language.Barbara Casavecchia is a writer, curator, and educator based in Milan, and currently mentor of the Ocean Fellowship at Ocean Space, Venice, for TBA21–Academy.

Womxn in Motion. Screamers

Womxn in Motion: The fourth Master symposium in the series Women in the Arts and Leadership, on October 7 and 8, 2020, at the Art Institute at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel was dedicated to ideas and iterations of performance, and to the way in which its embodied practices—its bodies—are often framed or received by narrow notions not only of gender, race, class, geography, technology, and temporality, but of what performance itself means and entails: a body in motion, for example. Whose body, though, and what kind of movement? Movement, indeed, is always both, suggesting something singular—a body in tender, private effort—and something collective.Presence, proximity, voice, movement, and performative relations are the tools by which many contemporary artists, in unprecedented ways, continue to explore how to create equitable space for our ever-regulated, dully delimited bodies. This symposium served those practices, examining how performance has become the means by which so many artists and thinkers reflect on and denounce political systems that foster inequity, violence, and binary relations at their core. Our various guests made explicit this set of relations—between singularity and collectivity, authenticity and performativity, a language of narrativity both visual and linguistic, movement both physical and intellectual. The complicated desire to perform for others and with others, and to read such performances correctly, was a recurring idea and impulse of the Womxn in Motion symposium, as it continued with performances, conversations, screenings, and readings by artists, thinkers, poets, filmmakers, composers, and teachers—performers all—including Kat Anderson, Julieta Aranda, Barbara Casavecchia, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Pan Daijing, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Ingela Ihrman, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Bhanu Kapil, Lynne Kouassi, Isabel Lewis, Tessa Mars, Sonia Fernández Pan, Sadie Plant, and Martina-Sofie Wildberger.LoopIn this episode Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro gives her lecture “Hyena Days,” in which she considers ideas and forms of fragment, continuance, colonial violence, and archive in the work of her chosen ancestors, particularly the exemplary work and life of the Black American lesbian poet and activist Audre Lorde. Her contribution is followed by a conversation with Quinn Latimer, Chus Martínez, and Italian writer, curator and educator Barbara Casavecchia.

Womxn in Motion. Loop

Womxn in Motion: The fourth Master symposium in the series Women in the Arts and Leadership, on October 7 and 8, 2020, at the Art Institute at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel was dedicated to ideas and iterations of performance, and to the way in which its embodied practices—its bodies—are often framed or received by narrow notions not only of gender, race, class, geography, technology, and temporality, but of what performance itself means and entails: a body in motion, for example. Whose body, though, and what kind of movement? Movement, indeed, is always both, suggesting something singular—a body in tender, private effort—and something collective.Presence, proximity, voice, movement, and performative relations are the tools by which many contemporary artists, in unprecedented ways, continue to explore how to create equitable space for our ever-regulated, dully delimited bodies. This symposium served those practices, examining how performance has become the means by which so many artists and thinkers reflect on and denounce political systems that foster inequity, violence, and binary relations at their core. Our various guests made explicit this set of relations—between singularity and collectivity, authenticity and performativity, a language of narrativity both visual and linguistic, movement both physical and intellectual. The complicated desire to perform for others and with others, and to read such performances correctly, was a recurring idea and impulse of the Womxn in Motion symposium, as it continued with performances, conversations, screenings, and readings by artists, thinkers, poets, filmmakers, composers, and teachers—performers all—including Kat Anderson, Julieta Aranda, Barbara Casavecchia, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Pan Daijing, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Ingela Ihrman, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Bhanu Kapil, Lynne Kouassi, Isabel Lewis, Tessa Mars, Sonia Fernández Pan, Sadie Plant, and Martina-Sofie Wildberger.Alta EgoIn this episode Tessa Mars, a Haitian visual artist living and working in Port-au-Prince, talks about her practice as a performance that is not limited to the living body. The ancestors she is specifically referring to are those heroes of the Haitian Revolution, enslaved peoples who famously rose up against and defeated French colonial rule and the system of slavery there.

Womxn in Motion. Alta Ego

Womxn in Motion: The fourth Master symposium in the series Women in the Arts and Leadership, on October 7 and 8, 2020, at the Art Institute at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel was dedicated to ideas and iterations of performance, and to the way in which its embodied practices—its bodies—are often framed or received by narrow notions not only of gender, race, class, geography, technology, and temporality, but of what performance itself means and entails: a body in motion, for example. Whose body, though, and what kind of movement? Movement, indeed, is always both, suggesting something singular—a body in tender, private effort—and something collective.Presence, proximity, voice, movement, and performative relations are the tools by which many contemporary artists, in unprecedented ways, continue to explore how to create equitable space for our ever-regulated, dully delimited bodies. This symposium served those practices, examining how performance has become the means by which so many artists and thinkers reflect on and denounce political systems that foster inequity, violence, and binary relations at their core. Our various guests made explicit this set of relations—between singularity and collectivity, authenticity and performativity, a language of narrativity both visual and linguistic, movement both physical and intellectual. The complicated desire to perform for others and with others, and to read such performances correctly, was a recurring idea and impulse of the Womxn in Motion symposium, as it continued with performances, conversations, screenings, and readings by artists, thinkers, poets, filmmakers, composers, and teachers—performers all—including Kat Anderson, Julieta Aranda, Barbara Casavecchia, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Pan Daijing, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Ingela Ihrman, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Bhanu Kapil, Lynne Kouassi, Isabel Lewis, Tessa Mars, Sonia Fernández Pan, Sadie Plant, and Martina-Sofie Wildberger.DancersThis episode is based on a lecture by Barbara Casavecchia, who is a writer, curator, educator based in Milan, and currently mentor of the Ocean Fellowship at Ocean Space, Venice, for TBA21–Academy. She is advocating for an embodied and entangled art and politics as found in her recent experience working within a set of queer and trans-feminist archives and collectives in Milan.

Womxn in Motion. Dancers

Womxn in Motion: The fourth Master symposium in the series Women in the Arts and Leadership, on October 7 and 8, 2020, at the Art Institute at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel was dedicated to ideas and iterations of performance, and to the way in which its embodied practices—its bodies—are often framed or received by narrow notions not only of gender, race, class, geography, technology, and temporality, but of what performance itself means and entails: a body in motion, for example. Whose body, though, and what kind of movement? Movement, indeed, is always both, suggesting something singular—a body in tender, private effort—and something collective.Presence, proximity, voice, movement, and performative relations are the tools by which many contemporary artists, in unprecedented ways, continue to explore how to create equitable space for our ever-regulated, dully delimited bodies. This symposium served those practices, examining how performance has become the means by which so many artists and thinkers reflect on and denounce political systems that foster inequity, violence, and binary relations at their core. Our various guests made explicit this set of relations—between singularity and collectivity, authenticity and performativity, a language of narrativity both visual and linguistic, movement both physical and intellectual. The complicated desire to perform for others and with others, and to read such performances correctly, was a recurring idea and impulse of the Womxn in Motion symposium, as it continued with performances, conversations, screenings, and readings by artists, thinkers, poets, filmmakers, composers, and teachers—performers all—including Kat Anderson, Julieta Aranda, Barbara Casavecchia, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Pan Daijing, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Ingela Ihrman, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Bhanu Kapil, Lynne Kouassi, Isabel Lewis, Tessa Mars, Sonia Fernández Pan, Sadie Plant, and Martina-Sofie Wildberger.Social ToolsIn this episode Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer are in conversation with Isabel Lewis, Lynne Kouassi and Sadie Plant.Isabel Lewis is a Berlin-based artist born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Trained in literary criticism, dance, and philosophy, her work encompasses myriad forms, from lecture performances to workshops, music sessions, parties, hosted occasions, and large-scale artistic/programmatic works like the Institute for Embodied Creative Practices.Lynne Kouassi is a Basel-based artist whose works explore the excluding effects of structural dominance and other normative orders, as well as the historical and social conditions that shape the relationship between body, gender, knowledge, and power. Her practice also addresses strategies for escaping control and questions of migration. Sadie Plant is a British philosopher, cultural theorist, and author based in Biel/Bienne. In her research and writings, she offers an alternative, feminist account of the history and nature of digital technology, and the influence of psychoactive substances on Western culture.

Womxn in Motion. Social Tools

Womxn in Motion: The fourth Master symposium in the series Women in the Arts and Leadership, on October 7 and 8, 2020, at the Art Institute at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel was dedicated to ideas and iterations of performance, and to the way in which its embodied practices—its bodies—are often framed or received by narrow notions not only of gender, race, class, geography, technology, and temporality, but of what performance itself means and entails: a body in motion, for example. Whose body, though, and what kind of movement? Movement, indeed, is always both, suggesting something singular—a body in tender, private effort—and something collective.Presence, proximity, voice, movement, and performative relations are the tools by which many contemporary artists, in unprecedented ways, continue to explore how to create equitable space for our ever-regulated, dully delimited bodies. This symposium served those practices, examining how performance has become the means by which so many artists and thinkers reflect on and denounce political systems that foster inequity, violence, and binary relations at their core. Our various guests made explicit this set of relations—between singularity and collectivity, authenticity and performativity, a language of narrativity both visual and linguistic, movement both physical and intellectual. The complicated desire to perform for others and with others, and to read such performances correctly, was a recurring idea and impulse of the Womxn in Motion symposium, as it continued with performances, conversations, screenings, and readings by artists, thinkers, poets, filmmakers, composers, and teachers—performers all—including Kat Anderson, Julieta Aranda, Barbara Casavecchia, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Pan Daijing, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Ingela Ihrman, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Bhanu Kapil, Lynne Kouassi, Isabel Lewis, Tessa Mars, Sonia Fernández Pan, Sadie Plant, and Martina-Sofie Wildberger.DreamersIn this episode Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer are in conversation with Lynne Kouassi, a Basel-based artist whose works explore the excluding effects of structural dominance and other normative orders, as well as the historical and social conditions that shape the relationship between body, gender, knowledge, and power. Her practice also addresses strategies for escaping control and questions of migration.

Womxn in Motion. Dreamers

The tenth and final episode of the Feminism Under Corona chapter follows a conversation with poet, playwright and theatre director Koleka Putuma. Author of the poetry book Collective Amnesia (2017) and the play No Easter Sunday for Queers (2017), she is Founder and Director of Manyano Media, a multidisciplinary project that produces and supports the work and stories of black queer artists and queer life. In a digital encounter last year, Koleka and rapper and songwriter Sho Madjozi were talking about ways of moving the poetry industry forward. Apparently, the term poetry is not related to industrial production. However, a closer look shows that poetry is indeed a part of the industry. For not only books or the materials that make them up are produced, but poetry and its authors have to negotiate continuously with contracts, copyrights, royalties, dissemination and presentation processes, etc. The work of poets and the writers encompasses not only the writing itself alone, but at the same time a constant task of administration and care in order to not only understand the system of the cultural industry they belong to, but to find out how to be able to enact with it. It is for this reason that for Koleka, poetry includes everything that makes it happen in very different ways. This conversation with Koleka Putuma took place at the end of January 2021. Koleka was in Cape Town and Sonia was in Berlin. They talked a lot about poetry, as a practice, as part of her early biography and as a working context. The pandemic appeared also from the social impact and political power that language holds. As we know, the very nature of a virus includes as part of its evolutionary process continuous transformations over time. The fact that these new variants appear in specific regions of this planet should not add national labels to the new mutations. They produce ideological implications and spread accumulated prejudices. And yet the media and many governments insist on referring territorially to processes that are beyond national identities. Structural violence against women and femicides are a pandemic long before the one produced by Covid-19. At the present time, not only do the two coexist structurally, but the current situation generally intensifies violence against women. Every Three Hours (2019) is a poem by Koleka Putuma that refers to the murder rate of womxn in South Africa and the insufficient state and social support to end this pervasive violence. In a world that depicts so many forms of violence in graphs and statistics, poetry and words are able to speak of what numbers do not count and do not tell. 

Feminism Under Corona. Writing with all of your senses.

The ninth episode is the result of a conversation with Christina Sharpe, scholar of English literature and Black Studies. Author of the books Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010) and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), she is currently a professor at York University in Toronto, Canada. Christina Sharpe's voice appeared earlier in several episodes of the “Corona Under the Ocean” podcast series over the course of 2020. Astrida Neimanis, Filipa Ramos or Elizabeth Povinelli would mention her work in the different conversations we had from the ocean and towards the waters. In the Wake is a book that I started to read in other people's voices but that does not let itself be translated into other people's words. It has its own different grammar that reveals and recounts grammar as a form of power. It’s an essay written in first person that tells the history and present of the black diaspora, the structural and constitutive anti-blackness of white colonialism and capitalism. During our conversation, Christina emphasized that the use of the first person and her own biography when writing In the Wake is not intended to speak of her individual experience as exceptional, but rather as an exercise in openness towards the historical and structural dimension of the book. Black suffering, also black resistance, must be contextualized in the long history of structural anti-blackness. Christina also tells how some people have seen in In the Wake a book about Black Death when it is also a book about Black Life, about forms of collective resistance within a constantly hostile climate. "I am interested in the ways we live in and despite that terror," she says. Being “in the wake” also implies the existence and possibility of "wake work". This conversation with Christina Sharpe took place at the end of December 2020. Christina was in Toronto and I was in Berlin. We began by talking about the sea and water and how her thinking is a thinking with water and with authors who think with water. It is also a form of tidal thinking, where Christina's voice carries many other voices and works in an explicit and non-linear way. Although speaking and writing can produce very different languages from each other, Christina Sharpe's way of speaking contains her writing and vice versa. In this conversation, not only do other voices appear within her own, but the writing itself becomes voice thanks to the organic becoming of talking into reading aloud. When writing is inscribed in bodies, they remind us that thinking is also visceral and material.

Feminism Under Corona. Being in the Wake

Promise No Promises is a podcasts series produced by the Women’s Center for Excellence, a research project between the Art Institute at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel and the Instituto Susch—a joint venture with Grażyna Kulczyk and Art Stations Foundation CH. The Women’s Center for Excellence is conceived as a think tank tasked to assess, develop, and propose new social languages and methods to understand the role of women in the arts, culture, science, and technology, as well as in all knowledge areas that are interconnected with the field of culture today. The podcast series originates from a series of symposia initiated in October 2018 in Basel and moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer. Part of the Women’s Center for Excellency, the symposia and the podcasts are the public side of this research project aimed to develop different teaching tools, materials and ideas to challenge the curricula, while creating a sphere where to meet, discuss, and foster a new imagination of what is still possible in our fields.

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Promise No Promises!

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