Promise No Promises!

The Episode is part of the series "Going to the Limits of Your Longing, Research as Another Name for Care", a collection of episodes emerged from the Master Symposium held in spring 2021 at the Institute Art Gender Nature FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel. The contributions to the symposium were devoted to ideas and forms of artistic research that center art as a practice in service of the social. They revisit certain moments in our recent history and present of researching, producing, and exhibiting art in the name of such beliefs, namely social justice.

The Episode is part of the series "Going to the Limits of Your Longing, Research as Another Name for Care", a collection of episodes emerged from the Master Symposium held in spring 2021 at the Institute Art Gender Nature FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel. The contributions to the symposium were devoted to ideas and forms of artistic research that center art as a practice in service of the social. They revisit certain moments in our recent history and present of researching, producing, and exhibiting art in the name of such beliefs, namely social justice.

The Episode is part of the series "Going to the Limits of Your Longing, Research as Another Name for Care", a collection of episodes emerged from the Master Symposium held in spring 2021 at the Institute Art Gender Nature FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel. The contributions to the symposium were devoted to ideas and forms of artistic research that center art as a practice in service of the social. They revisit certain moments in our recent history and present of researching, producing, and exhibiting art in the name of such beliefs, namely social justice.

The Episode is part of the series "Going to the Limits of Your Longing, Research as Another Name for Care", a collection of episodes emerged from the Master Symposium held in spring 2021 at the Institute Art Gender Nature FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel. The contributions to the symposium were devoted to ideas and forms of artistic research that center art as a practice in service of the social. They revisit certain moments in our recent history and present of researching, producing, and exhibiting art in the name of such beliefs, namely social justice.

«Radical Listening» is the sixth episode that follows a conversation with Ericka Florez.

«Hybrid Worlds within Unusual Realities» is the fifth episode that follows a conversation with writer Giovanna Rivero. Author of numerous short stories and novels, essays, chronicles, and academic articles, among her many books written in Spanish are "Tukzon, historias colaterales" (2008), and more recently "Tierra fresca de su tumba". Living creatures of fiction is Giovanna Rivero's name for what many call characters. Another term she uses is " incarnations ", appealing to their corporeal and material dimension. The subjectivities that exist in fiction have as many bodies as there are readers who feel and embody them. Many genres flow intensely and rapidly through her novel at the same time: science fiction, detective fiction, fantasy... And of course, reality. All of them inhabit a story made up of many stories that do not follow a predictable sequence. The hybrid worlds of Tukzon are part of unusual and extraordinary realities of the world we live in. The sensitivity to the environment is very pres

«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 w

"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 spher

“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 m

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 m

  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), publi

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 thin

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 thin

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 thin

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 thin

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 thin

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 thin

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

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 co

The podcast Promise No Promises! opens a new chapter called “Feminisms in the Caribbean”. This series of 4 new episodes arises from personal conversations between curator and writer Sonia Fernández Pan and art practitioners from the Caribbean region. The collaboration is part of the public program of the past exhibition "one month after being known in that island" at the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger with the Caribbean Art Initiative.The changeful history of the colonization of the Caribbean has left deep scars that are still present today. This is best known by artists and cultural practitioners who work in their own way on an identity of its own for the Antilles. The term “Caribbean” here is used primarily in a geographical sense to help overcoming local antagonisms between different political systems, languages and cultures, while allowing artists of all origins to exchange ideas and thus work together on a Caribbean identity. This series of podcasts aims to engage with a plurality of voices from differen