This conversation addresses an important aspect of Merve Bedir’s work (along with Jason Hilgefort at Land+Civilization Compositions) regarding the architectural and linguistic dimension of Turkish politics regarding the 2.5 million refugees the country currently “hosts”—the very notions of “host” and “guest” are the first things discussed here. Through the description of several sites of either appropriation or dispossession/detention by and of refugee bodies in Istanbul and in other regions of Turkey, we try to think of the architect’s political role and responsibility, remembering however that we must always doubt of our own actions when they have such drastic consequences. Merve Bedir ...

This conversation was recorded with Hoda Katebi, the self-defined “sarcastic (& angry) Muslim-Iranian writer, photographer, and activist living in Chicago” behind the political fashion blog JooJoo Azad (“free bird” in Farsi) to be featured in The Funambulist 15 (Jan-Feb. 2018) Clothing Politics #2. In January 2017, a few days after the inauguration of the current U.S. President and the subsequent massive feminist protest, she wrote an article entitled “Please Keep Your American Flags Off My Hijab” about which we discuss in this interview, along with many other facets of her work with regards to clothing in relation to imperialism, capitalism ...

This conversation with two members of a relatively new whistleblowing platform—we called them Sarah and Cleo to preserve their anonymity—intends to present the latter. It allows people working on development projects in London to leak information that can be used by local inhabitant associations to organize in time their defense against their planned eviction. We discuss the platform both theoretically—the conceptual approach to disobedience will be presented in the next conversation with Elena Loizidou—and practically, through the perspective of (often young) architects working in development projects, and the ones of local associations through the workshops organized by Concrete Action. Information ...

This podcast is the first one to have two guests, Miami-based artists, writers and editors Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza, for an account of their collaborative work manifested in several texts and exhibitions. This conversation focuses on their analysis of “Generic Objects” that allows the optimal function of globalized capitalism (containers, cranes, ships, highways, palettes, buckets, etc.) through a universal metric system, as well as a more local tinkering of these objects in Miami’s Little Haiti for a more local economic form. It concludes the short series of podcasts in Miami. Gean Moreno is an artist and writer based in Miami. ...

Léopold Lambert met with Indigenous Lakota activists Madonna Thunder Hawk and Marcella Gilbert during their passage in France to present Christina D. King and Elizabeth A. Castle’s film Warrior Women that portrays their struggle over two generation — Madonna is Marcella’s mother. In this conversation, we talked about four episodes of Indigenous resistance in Turtle Island (North America): the occupations of Alcatraz (1969), Mount Rushmore (1971), Wounded Knee (1973) and Standing Rock (2016), all of which were experienced by Madonna. Madonna Thunder Hawk is an Oohenumpa Lakota. Born and raised across the Oceti Sakowin homelands, she first became active in the late 1960s ...

Following our recent debate “Politics of Spatial Segregation” that shed light on racist Danish housing policies and the notion of structural discrimination co-hosted with CAMP – Center for Arts on Migration Politics in Copenhagen on 22 March, Margarida Waco from The Funambulist met with the two co-founders of the association Almen Modstand (Common Resistance), Fatma Tounsi and Marie Northroup, for a conversation about current legislation and the founding pillars of the association. The starting point of the conversation was a new strategy to rid Denmark of a parallel society by 2030 presented by the Danish Government in March 2018. To counteract ...

This podcast, recorded with the three founders of Demilit (Bryan Finoki, Nick Sowers, and Javier Arbona) is a precedent for Archipelago since it constitutes both a walk to examine the hyper controlled policed space of downtown Oakland and a receptacle for the echoes of Occupy Oakland that comes as interludes to our discussion. We observe objects and spaces that are produced by securitarian logic that often attempt to dissimulate their function by an aesthetic of the ordinary. Starting from Oakland City Hall where Occupy used to have its encampment, we spend the first part of the conversation around the administrative/corporate center of ...

This conversation with Karim Kattan introduces the art residency he recently created in Jericho. Entitled el-Atlal (the ruins), this residency allows us to discuss about the political strategy that this Palestinian cultural project intends to adopt and, beyond it, also the concept of ruin in Palestine, as well as this very particular place in the Jordan Valley, a “central margin” as Karim says, between Jerusalem and Amman and the Northern and Southern part of the country. Jericho is at a key moment of its extremely long history, experiencing urban and cultural developments that simultaneously allows it to foresee the future of Palestine and also threatens its fragile ...

“The definition of an ominous optimist is someone that goes through bad days in his life but is still optimistic for the future” says Mat Randol in “Ominous optimist ft. the solar system.” Such an affirmation synthesizes well the tone of this conversation with Mawena Yehouessi & Steffi Njoh Monny, respectively founder and editor-in-chief of the online platform Black(s) to the Future. In it, we discuss about the political role of science fiction and speculative visions for the African diaspora through humor and (terrestrial and extraterrestrial) gravity. Steffi Njoh Monny, as in Steffi Graf—same name, same date of birth, only twenty years earlier… ...

If you’ve been listening to this podcast these past eight years, you know that we always do our interviews “in house,” as we value the moment of the recorded conversation as well as the encounter with someone’s work and personality. Rules are made to have exceptions however, and today we are happy to introduce you to a conversation between Amélie Tresfels and Michaëla Danjé around the book that Michaëla recently edited,  entitled AfroTrans. This book is the very first one published by Cases Rebelles‘ newly created publishing house. With this new endeavor, the panafrorevolutionary collective co-founded by Michaëla, continues to ...

This conversation is the second one recorded live at Studio-X Amman Lab (the first one being with Rahel Aima & Ahmad Makia). Recorded with Dena Qaddumi, it attempts to propose a struggle narrative for Palestine that is not focused on Jerusalem to which many of us contribute, thus participating in a debate mostly focused on the 1967 war. By examining the spatial politics of Jaffa-Tel Aviv, Dena attempts to show that similar “ethonocratic” logic of segregation are also at work in an environment admittedly less militarized. This logic also incorporates the same capitalist mechanisms of gentrification at work in other ...

Proverbs for Decolonized Consciences Ali Jimale Ahmed is a Somali poet, cultural critic, short-story writer, and scholar. He is Professor and former chair of Comparative Literature at Queens College of the City University of New York, where he also teaches for the Africana Studies Program and the Department of Classical, Middle Eastern, and Asian Languages and Cultures; he is also on the Comparative Literature faculty at the CUNY Graduate center. His books include The Invention of Somalia (1995), Daybreak Is Near: Literature, Clans, and the Nation-State in Somalia (1996), Fear Is a Cow (2002), Diaspora Blues (2005), The Road Less Traveled: ...