The Funambulist Podcast
Initiated in 2013, The Funambulist Podcast consists in long interviews with people whose work we admire and from which we learn. In its early years, the podcast received two generous grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Series Titles
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Nothing of what we wear is politically innocent. Our clothing constitutes the skin of our public body, what Mimi Thi Nguyen calls its “epidermalization.” This public body is read through a set of norms and expectations that crystallize society’s ostracism. Mimi and I talked about normative processes that unfold themselves through clothing (the hoody, the veil, the sweatpants), as well as neo-colonial politics implemented in the various American military operations in countries like Vietnam and Afghanistan. Mimi Thi Nguyen is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of The ... -
Each architecture that was thought as a physical implementation of private property contains already in itself the potential for containment in a legal situation like the one of quarantine. David Garcia talks about the origins of such a situation, its territorialization (lazaretto, Ellis Island etc.) as well as its application on bodies, but also on entire landscapes like in Chernobyl and Fukushima. We discuss about Michel Foucault’s definition of biopolitics through the historical example of the quarantined city that suffers from the plague, as well as David’s own architectural projects in response to the various problems tackle by quarantine. David Garcia ... -
The law is an apparatus of power that inscribes itself on the bodies. Legal theorist Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos responds to questions, hypotheses and intuitions I have as an architect about the relationship between law, space and bodies. Beyond my own understanding of the law as the diagrammatization of the relationships of power that architecture undertakes to embody through its materiality, Andreas prefer to think of the law as a whole, even including paradoxically the outlaw within its system. In this understanding, we look together at the law’s axioms, its requisites and its signs. Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos is the director of the Westminster Law ... -
Every publishing house constructs an editorial line of its own. Sometimes it has to do with the topic, sometimes with a question, sometimes with the authors… In the case of punctum books however, the editorial line is to be found in the failure of the book it publishes to properly take place into a given academic category. The manifesto that lies behind such choice is the topic of the conversation I had with Eileen. The not-so-well-known (at least for me) medieval era meets the scheme of the archipelago dear to this platform, as we imagined together a non-institutionalized university where ... -
Daniel and I had this conversation the day after the 2013 Goldsmiths Graduate Conference, where we were both participating in a panel suitably entitled “The Sea, Shores, Islands – Territory, Sovereignty and the State.” His paper “The Construction of the End,” given that day is the starting point of our discussion, in which we discuss the legal debates about the location of the shore line in Spain, the national claims of sovereignty of a given territory based on scientific and technological criteria, as well as the various circumventions of the law that provide a form of cabinet of architectural curiosities of which ... -
Lucy and I start this conversation around the legal strategies at work in contemporary India. Between the eminent domain, legal reminiscence of the colonial era used by state-backed developers, and the immanent domain that informal settlements constitute for their own survival in the city, we discuss about how law and its spatial practices can be used as political strategies. We also evoke William Burroughs’s fictitious territory of the Interzone as the place of suspension of the law, the thickness of the diagrammatic line designed by legal architects, a liminal space where one can deliberately inhabit, but where others are forced into. Lucy completed ... -
This conversation I had with Michael Badu, evolves around his architectural practice that mostly consists in the design of mosques in Europe. We talk about his “funambulism,” trying to find his ethical equilibrium between the recurrent ostracism facing a practicing Muslim in Western societies—although Michael does not talk too much about it—and the conservatism of some of his religious clients. But this conversation happens to be primarily an architectural one, where we wonder about the architect’s dilemma about what can be accepted as a commission and for which reason. Similarly to essential questions, this one cannot be categorically answered. Michael Badu ... -
The multiplicity of mediums used by Erin Manning to address the Spinozist question of “what can a body do” certainly influences this conversation and its “start from the middle,” a Deleuzian notion of which she is particularly fond. Through fashion design, literature, dance and philosophy, we repeatedly explore how little we know of the body. This ignorance is however balanced by our certitude that all design/politics that consider the body in a normative manner rather than in its singularity will indubitably hurt it rather than work with it. Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy in ... -
In this conversation filmmaker Frédéric Tcheng and I reflect on what characterizes queer cinema. Despite the (fortunate) impossibility to attribute a systematic label on a film as “queer,” we attempt to dissociate films that integrate homosexual or transsexual narrative components within itself but yet remain within a relatively conventional structure, and thus contribute to a problematic yet interesting normalization of the LGBT community, from films that substantially transgress genre/gender through their very narrative structure. Such questions about normative processes and their subversion leads us beyond cinema to the domain of the social bodies. Frédéric Tcheng is a French-born filmmaker. He co-produced, ... -
This conversation is the first one I recorded for Archipelago (hence the not-so-great quality of the sound, sorry!). In the first part of the discussion, Sarah and I attempt to introduce the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon through his concepts of individuation, allagmatic, milieu, the body as “always more than one.” His work is important to us as Sarah explains because it went from a metaphysics of “being” to one of “becoming,” allowing things not to have an essence, but rather to be involved in the process of their individuation. In the second part of the conversation, I ask questions to Sarah ... -
This conversation is based around Morgan’s expertise in 16th-century European fortified architecture. We focus on Niccolò Machiavelli’s writings about the parallel that can be found between military architecture and the “virtuous” sovereignty of the Prince. Machiavelli distinguishes fortresses that are used in the context of the continuous state of war of the Italian cities from those used to protect the sovereign against its own people. Morgan and I cannot fail to notice the similitude in contemporary United States, its internal management of firearms and its external wars executed from the comfortable position of the drone pilot. Morgan is a scholar of ... -
This podcast is special as it is more of an homage than a conversation like the ones orchestrated for Archipelago. It is an excerpt of a recording — I apologize for the bad quality of the sound — I made in October 2011 with poet-artist-philosopher-architect Madeline Gins. She died on January 8, 2014 and it is not without emotion that I listened to this recording again. This conversation came after an exchange of letter that can be read on The Funambulist as preamble; we then had a conversation at the end of a day spent at the unique Bioscleave House ... -
Power of the Book: Clandestine Libraries in Cuba & Infinite Ones in Borges’s Work The Funambulist PodcastThis conversation with Liduam Pong is primarily based on the essay she wrote for the first volume of The Funambulist Papers (Punctum Books, 2013). She was describing in it her experience growing up in Cuba where some books were considered as subversive and thus forbidden. This interdiction was followed by the creation of informal clandestine libraries for people to access these books. We therefore speak about the political power a book contains within a simple object, and attempt to understand this power through indirect political means, through the reading of Jorge Luis Borges’s literature and his quest of the infinite. Liduam ... -
This conversation with Martin Byrne aims at introducing the rich literary work of science fiction author Philip K. Dick (1928-1982). We explore together his recurrent hypotheses of overlapping realities, the idea of entropy of matter and mind as expressed through the neologisms of kipple and gubble, the question of what is a human being thanks to the character of the android, and finally Dick’s mysticism through his exegesis. Dick’s work has been adapted many times in cinema and is recurrently quoted in current events, as his inexhaustible imagination has depicted more or less near futures which base tell us something about our present. Martin ... -
This conversation is an interview I did with graphic novelist Marc-Antoine Mathieu for Chicago-based architectural journal MAS Context (Issue 20: Narrative). The interview was made in French as you will hear, but for the purpose of Archipelago, this version is dub with the English version given by Liduam Pong. Marc-Antoine and I speak about his fascination to design labyrinths in which he can loose his characters, his readers, and himself as well. We also evoke the specificity offered by this unique medium of the graphic novel, as well as the way third and fourth dimensions can be considered and imagined through this ... -
Lucia Jalón Oyarzun and I share a fascination for the act of cartographying. In this conversation, we establish the impossibility for a map to live by the status of objectivity that the common understanding of it comprises. We look at cartographies accomplished by her students or by Peter Greenaway in his film A Walk Through H. (1978), which, on the contrary, embrace their subjectivity. This embrace is often characterized by their modus operandi that creates these maps through a dimensioning accomplished directly by the body, the body being what is subjected by the spaces that these cartographies describe. Lucia Jalón Oyarzun is an architect by ... -
In this interview, film-anthropologist Harjant Gill introduces the figure of the young rural Sikh man in Indian Punjab, who later migrates to the capital city, Chandigarh or abroad. We base our conversation both on Harjant’s thesis that presents a research about the (normative) notion of masculinity constructed within these young migrants’ imaginaries (through cinema for example), as well as on his film Roots of Love (see below), which introduces the bodily characteristics that a Sikh man must present continuously, in particular the unshorn hair and the turban covering it. Harjant and I thus talk about this particular object that enfolds within it ... -
Hana Tajima and I recently sat down to talk about one aspect of her work as a fashion designer. Some of the clothing she designs have the particularity to incorporate the hijab (Islamic veil) that currently suffers from an absolute lack of discursive complexity and contextualization. Our conversation is organized in such a way that we first describe the hijab only in its physical characteristics, as “a piece of cloth.” Once we have a grasp at its object properties, we then proceed to intensify it with the symbolic and political position it carries voluntarily and involuntarily within a given context. ... -
For this podcast, I asked questions to Pamela Brown about the role of debt in American society and the way its very function has been historically affecting, and continues to affect the African-American community in particular. Debt should normally be understood as a mutually beneficial contract but has been transformed into yet another capitalist apparatus of profit-making. It functions through an ideology of promise that ensures the conformity of life paths and the perpetuation in the future of the roles in the present society. Once the mechanisms that intertwines debt and race have been exposed, Pamela describes the work she ... -
For Nikolaos Patsopoulos, the current situation in Europe is similar to the one in Russia right before the revolution and so should be the architecture that accompanies these shift of social paradigms. We discuss about the role of the architect in revolutionary movements, as (s)he has probably more to unlearn than to teach in this matter. For Nikolaos however, each body that modifies the way the built environment (in particular the street) operates politically can be called architect. We therefore spend the time to contrast these two figures sharing the same name of architect, one that contributes actively to the production of ... -
This conversation with Nina Valerie Kolowratnik is divided into two parts. The first one consists in the description of her work to engage the dilemma that the Native American tribe of Jemez Pueblo faces in the lawsuit they filed against the United States to regain ownership over parts of their ancestral homeland in New Mexico. The dilemma for the tribe consists in either documenting and revealing their use of the land and the secret ritual practices linked to it, or not being able to produce any valid proof for the standards of a Western court. Her architectural expertise allows Nina ... -
This podcast is the first one of a series of three recorded during a short residency at the Miami Rail. It addresses the on-going photographic series that artist Adler Guerrier constructs around the performativity of the flaneur. From the romantic figure described by Walter Benjamin in his writings about Charles Baudelaire, to its anti-capitalist offspring as defined by the Situationists, Adler explains how the action of flanerie (aimless walk) is a means to gather knowledge. He tells us how the body of the flaneur is a nameless solitary figure that the film noir’s amnesiac embodies the best, looking for markers ... -
This (bilingual) conversation with clothing designer Liliam Dooley has for object her most recent work, Project X (see below) for which she cut two distinct second-hand dresses and assembled them together to produce a third one. The particularity of this project is to voluntarily function with low costs of production in order to address a broader social audience than unique clothing usually does. Creativity and economic justice are therefore involved by a designer who has for aim to disappear. These clothing are the meeting point of three designers (the two original ones and Liliam), but also three bodies who influence ... -
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. ... -
This conversation with Alondra Nelson focuses on the socio-historical descriptions of her book Body and Soul (University of Minnesota, 2011) that unfolds the work of the Black Panthers (late 1960s – 1970s) to resist against the highly discriminatory mechanisms of the politics of health in the United States. Following the structure of the book, we discuss the discrimination against the African American community, both in its negligence (inappropriate healthcare response to disease, prohibitive cost of care) and in its active medicalization of marginalized bodies (scientific research on convicts and women, experimental brain surgery). Against this systemic oppression, the Black Panther Party created its ... -
In this conversation, Mahmoud Keshavarz and I talk about our common interest for the way the designed environment (in particular objects) unfolds a violence to the bodies that it hosts, as well as the potential political actions that can be undertook through design. Mahmoud’s work being particularly focused on the facilitated or obstructed fluxes of migration, we discuss at length the politics of objects that regulate them, the passport in particular, but also the charter flight that implements the expulsion of a body from a given territory. We speak of the regime of invisibility of the violence in which the ... -
This conversation with Sophia Azeb is the first of a series recorded along the American and Canadian West Coast. Sophia and I talk about our frustrations to see the lack of imagination offered by the “solutions” (a highly problematic term) often given to end what remains problematic to call “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” In opposition to the traditional “two-state solution” and “one-state solution,” Sophia proposes a “no-state solution,” that refuses the recognition of any property on the land and thus, state-sovereignty. We talk about the land being practiced by the bodies, and the bodies being fragments of the land, through a ... -
Feminism, Participation, and Crises in Architecture: For More than a Politics of Simulacra The Funambulist PodcastIn this conversation, Mimi Zeiger and I examine a problem internal to the architectural world, yet that can be found in various forms in other disciplines. The “politics of simulacra” consists in a discursive use of consensual notions to describe practices that do not fully engage with the problems that they claim to address. In this regard, curating exhibitions or publications celebrating “women in architecture” often falls short of making a deep feminist argument. Similarly, the recent sum of energy spent around questions of “participation,” “openness,” “horizontality,” are interesting in what they suggest but too often do not make the ... -
Alysabeth Alexander and I recorded this conversation a few hours before the Service Employees International Union (in which she has important responsibilities) filed a lawsuit against the city of San Francisco, Google and Apple for deliberately ignoring the environmental impact that the tech industry buses (aka “Google buses”) have on the Californian city in their daily use. The environmental aspect of the buses is the one that has been chosen for the lawsuit, yet the main political consequence of their very function is the rampant gentrification that accompany their routes. In this conversation, Alysabeth describes the various actions that the ... -
On the Non-Greenness of Nature: Debris, Dust and Other Atmospheric Architectures The Funambulist PodcastThis conversation with David Gissen uses his two book Subnature and Manhattan Atmospheres in order to demystify the politically charged romanticism of a “green” nature. We talk about the unwanted matter of architecture: dust, puddles, debris, exhaust as components of a subnature that carry in them more ambiguous socio-political narratives than the marketable greenness. The second part of the conversation is particularly attached to the history of the atmospheric urbanity of Manhattan, before we end by introducing David’s project to reproduce the mound of dirt of the 1871 Paris Commune on which the Vendôme Column had been ceremonially destroyed. David Gissen is associate professor of architecture ... -
This podcast consists in an introduction to the book of Karen Tongson’s book Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (2011) that primarily situates its research in Orange County and the Inland Empire, both in Southern California. Demystifying the outsider imaginary of a white heteronormative suburbia, Karen makes for us a (non-exhaustive) inventory of the events and objects that populate these queer imaginaries. From the houses front yards to the mini-malls and from the the Studio K to the performances of JJ Chinois and British pop muisc, she recounts the navigation of queers bodies both in the space of suburbia and in the televisual/musical broadcasted environment. Karen ... -
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 ... -
Sarah Mirk and I had this conversation in the offices of Bitch magazine where she works as online editor. After introducing the magazine, for which she regularly uses the medium of comic to describe social/historical/cultural aspects of the feminist struggle, we address her personal work that also engages such medium. In The Secret Life of Gitmo Women, she and Lucy Bellwood created a comic book that recounts the life of two female veterans from the US Navy when they were assigned in Guantanamo Bay. We also talk about prisons and her experience teaching playwriting there, as well as the interesting inmate personalities that ... -
In early May, Gastón Gordillo received me at the University of British Columbia, which allowed us to talk about his upcoming book, Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction, as well as the essay “Nazi Architecture as Affective Weapon” written for The Funambulist Papers series. We talk about the politics of ruins from Albert Speer’s plans for Third Reich Berlin that was meant to generate glorious ruins to the different types of ruins that exist at the foot of the Andes in North Argentina. There, in contrast to the attitude by local authorities, local people do not view ruins as historic relics that should ... -
In this podcast, Renisa Mawani introduces her current work that uses the migrant ship Komagata Maru to address migration within its legal and temporal dimensions. We then continue this conversation by examining the arguments she made in the 2012 article “Law’s Archive,” which examines the available means to archive law within the collective narrative that the archive constitutes. The archive’s means are politically and physically determined in such a way that indigenous contributions—not always textual for instance—to this collective narrative cannot fully take part in it. This conversation therefore has a goal to challenge the way we commonly understand the notion of ... -
In this conversation, Derek Gregory shares with us a few aspects of his simultaneously broad and precise knowledge of the ways war function. We examine together the current so-called “war on terror” in which the United States and their allies have engaged since 2001. Derek distinguishes three spaces that need to be produced in order for war to operate physically and apparently legitimately. We first consider a drone as an object crystalizing both the paradigm of contemporary war, but also the vessel of all wrongly posed questions that perpetuate the status quo. All disciplines are mobilized for war: geography, technology, architecture, ... -
This conversation is the last one from the series of podcasts recorded on the US/Canadian West Coast. Kamal Arora brings us to Delhi where the research for her dissertation is set. From an introduction about female bodies navigating at risk in the public space, we focus more specifically on one space, called ‘the widow colony.’ The widows are women who saw their husbands killed during the 1984 massacre against the Sikh population consequently from the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Together, we examine how the physicality of this urban village partially determine the politics of its daily organization and ... -
This conversation was recorded in October 2013 with Camille Lacadée a moment before she filmed the installation she designed with François Roche for the Retrospective Pierre Huyghe at the Pompidou Center. The particularity of this podcast is that the editing was kindly made by Camille herself who ‘saved’ it from the atmospheric noise that surrounded us when recording it. This conversation constitutes a casual account of the creative process that she and her partner, François Roche, use in order to create works at the intersection of cinema and architecture. The recurrent element of these films could be seen in the ... -
For many years, Stuart Elden has thoroughly examined the concept of territory. In order to enter into this quasi-exhaustive research, I invited him to talk about the idea of volumetric territory, both in general and in the specific case of the occupied Palestinian territories. We borrow the notion of “politics of verticality” from Eyal Weizman in order to describe how sovereignty enforces itself onto subterranean, surface, and atmospheric spaces. Later, we use the work of Paul Virilio and Claude Parent and their architectural concept of oblique to challenge our common perception of territories in their flat cartographic interpretation. Finally, we discuss ... -
In this conversation, Sophia Seawell and I examine how violence unfolds on bodies through the conformity to the normative category that has been attributed to them. We look at this problem particularly in terms of gender, continuously perpetuated by bodily performativities that often manifests themselves spatially. In this regard, opening the door of a gendered bathroom and its semiotics constitutes for many of us as a deliberate acceptation of the gendered that has been attributed to us. Sophia’s research is particularly oriented toward bodies that have undertook to transgress performativity by adopting the one of the “opposite gender” to their normative attribution. ... -
In this conversation that occurred before her presentation at New York’s Left Forum, Tings Chak and I discuss the historical and contemporary racialized treatment of migrant bodies in North America and Europe. Refused, expelled, marginalized, or detained, the migrant body is a precarious one. Through Ting’s upcoming graphic-essay book, we talk about carceral architecture, in particular the one that embodies the numerous migrant detention centers in Canada. What does that mean at a legal standpoint to be incarcerated not for punishing reasons but for administrative reasons? How does architecture unfold violence upon bodies through its very physicality? What would that ... -
This conversation with Michelle Murphy is divided into two parts: BIOPOLITICAL FEMINISM: The first part introduces Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and applies it to forms of economization of life particularly in relation to female bodies. Paraphrasing Foucault, Michelle affirms that governmental capitalism needs for “some must not to be born so that future others will live more consumptibly, productively in the logic of macro-economy.” She thus unfolds the political history of regulation and ‘marketing’ of reproduction and contraception that organizes such an economization of life at a scale of a population. Further, we discuss Michelle’s concept of “The Girl” as the problematic current ... -
Nick Caverly received me in Detroit a day after I arrived in the city whose population and economy has been drastically shrinking for the last decades and is now populated with a multitude of ruins and empty lots. We discuss the governance of the city that is now piloted by an “Emergency Finance Manager,” who reduced public service to a worrisome level, mostly detrimental to the most impoverished populations of the city. We also talk of the newcomers in the city, the white “creative class,” which, despite a commendable optimism tends to develop an imaginary that omit the existence of ... -
Mimi Thi Nguyen is the first guest with whom I spoke twice for Archipelago (listen to our first conversation). This conversation was originally motivated by some unformulated concerns that I experienced during the campaign #bringbackourgirls in April-May 2014 in reaction to the rapt of 276 Nigerian young women by Boko Haram. I therefore meant to ask a few questions to Mimi, as well as converse with her about the crucial importance to formulate problems in ways that won’t make our questions legitimize that against what they want to challenge. The arguments we expose here emerged from Mimi’s long-documented research about supposedly ... -
This conversation with Fiona I.B. Ngô focuses on her book, Imperial Blues (2014) that develops a discourse around the simultaneous suppressive and productive aspects of race and sex through a travel in the various geo(chrono)graphies of New York in the 1920s. We talk of the various signs (bodies, objects, spaces) created and worn to reference the imperial vision of that that it is not. We also converse about the movement of bodies, at a transnational level, as much as at the level of the body dancing (“the cops are here, let’s play a waltz!”) without forgetting the movement between various neighborhoods of New ... -
This conversation with Naomi Paik exposes the arguments she develops in her forthcoming book currently entitled Rightlessness (2015). In it, she uses three historical examples of camps administrated by the United States in their efforts of manufacturing rightlessness for bodies it wants to exclude from traditional judicial channels. We begin the conversation by talking of the logic behind the late 1980s discussion about symbolical and financial reparations to Japanese American citizens who had been incarcerated in the infamous camps from 1942 to 1945. Naomi then describes the legal and physical existence of a camp in Guantanamo holding HIV positive refugees having fled the ... -
This conversation with Joe Masco can be seen as the third archipelic episode of what I like to call “counter-history of the American suburbia.” After talking with Olivia Ahn about the suburban house as a gender-making apparatus, and with Karen Tongson about processes of queering the suburbia, Joe and I converse about the territorial strategies at work in the creation of suburbia itself. The strategies were very much informed by both the propensity of capitalism, as well as the militarized prospect of a large-scale nuclear attack. Joe explains how an imaginary of fear—similar to the one we currently experience through ... -
This conversation with Alexander Weheliye is built upon the critique he made of the work of Giorgio Agamben, in particular in his essentialization of the muselmann in the context of the Holocaust. Alexander argues that slavery functions as a better paradigm to understand the “layering” of bare lives and the racial aspects that this understanding involves. He explains how he is interested in finding other ways to “claim humanity” than the traditional judicial one that attributes this status in a retroactive manner to suffering bodies. In order to do so, we evoke the works of major African-American and black Caribbean thinkers such as ... -
In this conversation, Miriam Ticktin and I talk about the problematic characteristics of discourses and legislation that particularize figures of innocence. Suffering and sick bodies are particularly subject to this process that distinguish innocent subjects from their necessary corollary, guilty ones. Miriam unfolds for us this aspect of her work regarding migrant’s claims for humanitarian exceptions and asylum in France. We talk of the role of the medical expertise in this context, as well as NGOs and other humanitarian institutions’ self-claim of “apolitical” function contrasting their particularism for suffering women or children for instance. We ends this conversation with the illustrative example of ... -
From Timbuktu to Fort de France: The Iconic Power of Monuments and Their Destruction The Funambulist PodcastWe begin this podcast with Bhakti Shringarpure introducing the online journal Warscapes that she founded. The discussion that follows emerges from an original unsuspected dialogue between two articles Bhakti and I wrote in Summer 2012, when Ansar Dine destroyed several Sufi mausoleums and precious manuscripts in Timbuktu. Bhakti had then put back into political and historical context and compared such “rage against the monuments” with the writings of Georges Bataille about the take of the Bastille, considered as the beginning of the 1789 French revolution. In my own article, I had attempted to show how both iconoclasts and iconodules are considered as ... -
This conversation is an introduction to the research conducted by Greg Barton for his thesis at CCCP (Critical, Curatorial & Conceptual Practices) at Columbia University. This research is essentially focused on Diego Garcia island situated in the middle of the Indian Ocean, a territory that was never decolonized and remains under British sovereignty. The island hosts a US military basis that was used for its geographic location during the cold war, the first Gulf War, and now the so-called “war on terror.” Similarly to Guantanamo’s Camp Delta, a legal narrative had to be produced in order for the basis to ... -
Ann Laura Stoler and I begin this conversation by introducing the political context lexicon that she co-curates and edits. We then discuss the work she had done around the colonial management of sexuality and reproduction. The existence of the métis (mix-blooded) child in the colony renders more complex the binary distinction between colon citizens and colonial subjects. Biology is nevertheless not merely the only site of recognition for the colonial administration, behavior is also extremely important in the access to citizenship. We examine how space, whether corridor or school, is built to accommodate the administrated behavior of the colony. Finally, Ann gives us a preview ... -
This conversation introduces the three first issues of the ARPA Journal (Applied Research Practices in Architecture) with its editor in chief (Janette Kim) and the guest editor of its second issue (Troy Conrad Therrien). We begin by looking at the editorial line of the journal itself, then examine the second forthcoming issue dedicated to “The Search Engine,” embodied by Google, whose algorithm influences the way any research is conducted nowadays. In the second part of the conversation, Janette and I examines the problems raised by the first issue, “Test Subjects,” and the relation/contrast between experiment and democratic processes in architecture. ... -
This conversation with Alejandro Hernandez Galvez is the first of a short series recorded in Latin America (Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil). This conversation series attempts to be specific to the places where they occur and, thus, this one focuses on the politics of space in the city of Mexico. We begin by evoking the romanticization of poverty that condemns the latter to remain as such, as well as absolute otherness. The symptoms of this romanticization often materialize through the fascination that architects (myself included) have for the improvised/informal architecture of the city without consideration for the social mechanisms that ... -
This conversation with Estefanía Vela introduces the components of the politics of gender in Mexico. We first talk about recent legislations and programs proper to Mexico City itself that constitute significant advancement in the struggle for recognition of equal rights for all lead by women, gays, and transsexual men and women (see the posters spotted in Mexico City’s subway below). We then look at the way the gender division is inscribed in the Mexican constitution, in particular in matters of labor. Even when it comes to rights given to pregnant women, the language that attributes them is symptomatic of the ... -
The title of this conversation with Francisco Díaz recorded in Santiago is the one he chose for the conference/book he co-organized/edited. The provocative question Who Cares for Chilean Cities? attempts to address the paradox of a high-quality of private architecture that does not contribute to the design of the country’s cities. Throughout this conversation, Francisco introduces the politics of space at work in Chilean cities, in particular in the capital city, Santiago. Spatial segregation between the upper social classes and the lower ones is manifest between the Western and Eastern parts of the city. We talk about urban interventions that provided an interesting debate ... -
This conversation with Liliana De Simone has for ambition to address the way architecture necessarily considers an idealized normalized body in order to conceive itself. Such a consideration almost always follows the dominant essentialization of bodies and this discussion addresses one in particular, gender. We first describe the canonical standardized bodies (often male) as defined by Le Corbusier, Neufert, and Dreyfuss. Then, we address more specifically the situation in South America (Colombia and Chile) and Liliana’s interest for urban policy making in this matter. We finish the conversation with the gender violence that resilience to catastrophes reasserts, in particular in the ... -
This conversation with social anthropologist Alejandro Grimson articulates the concept of border both at a philosophical level and at a local level through a few South American cases that he studied in the past. What does it mean to have a bridge joining two countries together? How about when it is an avenue that almost invisibly separates two countries? For Alejandro, borders as such are not against what we need to fight, but rather their means of implementation. In the second part of the conversation, we ‘zoom in’ Buenos Aires to observe how the Argentinean capital is also full of ... -
As discussed in the previous conversation with Alejandro Grimson, Argentina is built on a myth of Europeanness, thus concealing its indigenity from its national narrative. This conversation with Axel Lazzari introduces us to the historical and current political situations of the indigenous populations in Argentina. We begin by addressing the very terminology we use and the power of naming as a means of control. Axel then provides us with a short account of the European colonization of the indigenous land, subsequently enforced by the mapping of the territory. We look at the three historical maps below to understand the controlled ... -
In this conversation, we discuss about Gustavo Ciriaco’s choreographic work in order to address the politics of movement of the body–what we commonly call “dance”–in the public space. As a base for this discussion, we particularly talk about his piece, entitled Here whilst we walk, which consists in inviting a group of people to walk silently in a city while being surrounded by an elastic rubber band. On the contrary of other conversations part of the Latin American podcast series, we remain relatively non-specific for most of the conversation, before finally addressing the specificity of the (changing) Brazilian public space ... -
This conversation is the last one of the Latin America series. Antonádia Borges and I talk about the “weaponized architecture” that Brasilia as a ‘new city’—we also discuss this myth—has been implemented historically (during the two decades of dictatorship) and still nowadays through the strong social segregation at work. We evoke the more or less embraced violence of the funding of such a city, particularly materialized in the context of a dictatorship. The second part of the conversation is dedicated to the politics of time at work through the administration process of housing and welfare. The continuous availability that such ... -
This discussion with Momoyo Homma about the work of artists/poets/philosophers/architects Arakawa (1936-2010) and Madeline Gins (1941-2014) took place in the Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka where the Tokyo part of the Arakawa/Gins office is situated. We begin by introducing their work through a biographic approach, then through our interpretations of the manifesto “We Have Decided Not to Die,” which fuels the creative process of the five architectural projects built in Japan and in the United States, as well as the multitude of non-built ones. We conclude the conversation by describing the space around us, one of the Reversible Destiny Lofts: its bumpy floor, its sphere ... -
In this short conversation, Ethel Baraona Pohl and I discuss about the ever growing militarization of the polices of the world based on a lecture she gave the same day in Rotterdam for a seminar organized by Malkit Shoshan. We particularly insist on the American police example, which has manifested it clears belligerency against the African American population in the recent months in Ferguson, MO. We attempt to understand what are the founding logics of such a militarization, both at a philosophical, economic and legal level. We conclude the conversation by conversing about the picture of Ukrainian protesters aiming mirrors ... -
This first conversation with Alex Shams (the second will occur in Palestine this coming February) takes for site the Iranian city and the politics of gender exercised in it, both under the regime of the Shah and during these last thirty-five years in the context of the Islamic Republic. We start by establishing the framework of our critique and the traps to avoid—the example of Mehran Tamadon’s recent film Iranian (2014) being illustrative for this matter. Alex takes us then in his research articulating both the ideological/imaginary and the physical/urban context of gender politics in Iran. This includes a ‘chapter’ about the ... -
Olivia Snaije and I begin this conversation by discussing her multi-faceted work of journalist, editor and translator. We then converse more specifically about the book she co-edited with Mitchell Albert, Keep Your Eye on the Wall: Palestinian Landscapes (Saqi Books, 2014). This book gathers a series of essays and photographic work curated around the question of the Apartheid Wall in Palestine. We evoke most of its chapters, one by one, and extend the question raised by Malu Halasa about the problematic aestheticization of the Wall to the very exercise of photographing it. Olivia Snaije is a journalist and editor based in Paris who ... -
The Dalieh of Raouche is a large publicly accessible rock situated at the extremity of West Beirut peninsula. Like many coastal sites in Lebanon, it is currently the object of a private development plan, which tackles many questions about legal property, as well as social, ecological, and archaeological preservation. In December 2014, the Civil Campaign to Protect the Dalieh of Raouche wrote an open-letter to Rem Koolhaas, the master-planner of the project, in order to raise this questions in the public debate. This letter was shared at a scale that went beyond the sole city of Beirut (and of Lebanon), ... -
This conversation with Lyne Jabri introduces two examples of architectural activist work she has been participating/conducting. The first one consisted in the reconstruction of the Nahr el Bared Palestinian refugee camp in Northern Lebanon after it had been destroyed by the Lebanese army in 2007. The difficulties of such a project were multiple but we particularly converse around the exercise of retrospective mapping of the old camp to inform a more fair reconstruction. The second example is the work currently accomplished by Lyne and her colleagues of LilMadina Initiative in the Southern Lebanon city of Saida. As the city was under ... -
This conversation with Hana Sleiman begins a series of several around the Palestinian question(s). After evoking her archiving work of historical Arabic comic books and their construction of a political imaginary, Hana and I talk about this important construction of a Palestinian Oral History Archive at the American University of Beirut. This archive comprises about a thousand hours of interview with Palestinian having experienced the 1948 Nakba and its evictive violence. We particularly insist on the embraced subjectivities of such narratives, stressing that what is remembered and how it is remembered is more important than the illusory ambition of an ... -
This conversation with Ahmad Barclay turns around the work done by Visualizing Impact / Visualizing Palestine of which he is a partner. For the last few years, this Beirut-based office have produced a few dozens of visuals mostly representing didactically various aspects of life in the apartheid policies undertaken throughout the years by the Israeli government. We talk about the various statuses of citizenship and what they allow, the infrastuctural aspects of the apartheid (roads, public transportation, water, etc.), the destruction of Palestinian homes and olive trees, before concluding the conversation by evoking the broader work currently undertaken by Visualizing ... -
Monitoring the Occupation: The Israeli Settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories The Funambulist PodcastThis conversation with Dror Etkes addresses his work with organizations monitoring the Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, in particular through the NGO he created in 2012, Kerem Navot. We begin by conversing about the very name of this organization, telling the story of the biblical character, Navot, against whom King Ach’av plots to steal his land. We then examine both official and non-official Palestinian land seizing by the Israeli army and settlers. These takeovers are always characterized by their justification by a legal narrative claiming their legitimacy. We particularly insist on the agricultural function of most land expropriated ... -
This conversation with Maryam Monalisa Gharavi can be divided into three chapters, all corresponding to one physical aspect of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in relation to Palestinian bodies. We begins with the physicality of the wall and compare its securitarian spectacularity with the ones built at the edges of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas in the last decade. We then address the question of the ground and its ability to shake our convictions when no longer providing the resistance to the entropy named gravity, like during the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Finally, we talk about the colonized atmosphere on ... -
This second conversation with Alex Shams is entirely dedicated to the context in which it was recorded, Palestine. Through five significant fragments, we attempt to describe a non-exhaustive account of the Apartheid landscape created by the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The first fragment consists in the segregated roads, in particular the viaduct and tunnel of the Israeli settlement of Gilo, nearby the place of this conversation. The second and third fragments are the Palestinian villages of Nabi Samuel and Al Walaja that both became enclaves, surrounded by the apartheid wall built by the State of ... -
This conversation with Rahel Aima and Ahmad Makia is the first of two (the second one is with Dena Qaddumi) recorded live in the event organized by Columbia University Studio-X in Amman, directed by Funambulist friend Nora Akawi. This is a presentation of Archipelago in general and of the Levant series in particular as it originally preceded the conversation with Rahel and Ahmad. We begin the latter with the introduction of their online/printed platform, THE STATE, and its subtle articulation between the politics of space and the politics of body. This discussion mostly focuses on the third issue of THE ... -
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 ... -
This conversation is the first of three recorded in Cairo about Cairo. Beth Stryker and Omar Nagati, through the description of their research and design work, introduce us to the post-revolution city and its multiple forms of informal architectures. We begin by evoking the numerous passageways of Downtown and the work of CLUSTER to rehabilitate two of them. We then describe these forms of informality, the danger in romanticizing them—by systematically assuming that they advance the common good—and what can be learn from them. We then conclude by problematizing the act of cartographying what was not meant to be mapped, ... -
Sometimes, describing the spatial politics of a city requires to holistically consider its history and geography. Some other times, we may decide to explore a city’s sociality through one of its objects in particular. This is what we do in this conversation with Manar Moursi about her project with David Puig, Sidewalk Salon. This particular object is the street chair of Cairo that populates its streets in various forms and involves various forms of politics. In this regard, we focus on the gender aspect of the street chair’s use, as well as the territoriality it implies. The final part of ... -
This conversation with May al-Ibrashy is the last one of a series of twelve recorded in the Levant and Egypt. In it, we discuss the current political situation of Egypt after the 2011 revolution and the 2013 military coup d’état. As she writes, “my new motto [is] if you’re not confused, you’re stupid.” Trying not to fall into stupidity, we thus attempt to question the various problems that creates such a confusion, in particular when it comes to heritage. In this regard, the fire at the Institut d’Egypte that burned thousands of documents in December 2011 is exemplary of a political ... -
This conversation with Caren Kaplan introduces the work she has been conducting for her forthcoming book dedicated to a genealogy of aerial photography (and painting) and its militarization leading to the ‘age of the drone’ we currently experience. We begin with the development of the balloon, the progressive learning necessary to understand this new point of view on the world and the simultaneous success of panorama paintings. We then evoke the creation of the British Board of Ordinance and its survey of Scotland as part of the counter-insurrectionist effort to control the terrain against the Jacobites. We conclude the discussion in ... -
Throughout this conversation with Philippe Theophanidis, we examine two paradigmatic historical examples of cities in the state of exception. We begin with Boston, invested by 2,500 police officers, swat teams and national guard during the manhunt that followed the marathon bombings in April 2013. We particularly examine the legal regime that allowed this deployment to happen, while inhabitants were forced to stay in their homes, many of which were searched. We then talk about Istanbul, a few months later (summer 2013), during Occupy Gezi and the systematic use of tear gas by the suppressive police forces. We use this example ... -
Paris’s Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture (ESA) is 150 years old this year. For the last two years however, this association’s current director, François Bouvard, has imposed a pedagogy and internal politics that is perceived by most students and teachers as profoundly conservative, if not despotic. In the beginning of April 2015, the firing of nine (unionized) members of the school administration has triggered a strike followed by the overwhelming majority of students, as well as many teachers, demanding the director’s resignation, the re-hiring of the nine fired members of the association, as well as a significant shift in the school’s pedagogy. In this conversation, ... -
Throughout this conversation, we explore the multiple facets of Liam Young’s work for Tomorrow Thoughts Today (originally founded with Darryl Chen) and the Unknown Fields Division (with Kate Davies), his studio at the Architectural Association in London that took him to various expeditions around the world in order to document how our cities, in their infrastructure, extend far beyond their geographical limits and produce geological landscapes. As we discuss, the tentative does not consist in moralizing this production, but rather intervening within it as designers, often through (science) fiction that allows to problematize situations and to expand imaginaries. The last ... -
This conversation with Laleh Khalili evolves around her ongoing research about the geopolitics at work in the capitalist and military ship transportation around the Arabian Peninsula. This interview is structured in a geographical manner, reproducing the trip Laleh accomplished in February 2015 on a container ship between Malta and Jabal Ali (Dubai’s container port). We first address the politics of the ship itself, before going through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Gulf of Oman, the Hormuz Strait, and the Persian Gulf, to finally end on the narrow Iraqi shores. Laleh Khalili is a professor of ... -
This conversation is the third one about the formation of a public body through clothing. Although this discussion was not intended to mostly focus on head garments, most of it can be gathered under this… cap. Through the two examples of the creation of the Gandhi cap during the Indian movement for the independence, and the hijab, we explore the two books written by Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters (1996) and Visibly Muslim (2010). We particularly insist on the political semiology of these garments, which dooms any definite interpretation to fail, but recognizes their capacity to construct a collective identity and the potential for solidarity that ... -
This conversation with Fabiola López-Durán is primarily structured around her work exploring Le Corbusier’s eugenic ideology from 1925 Paris to 1941 Vichy. At a moment when many events and debates are organized around his paradigmatic work, the main critiques seem to focus on his personal political engagement and ideology without fully engaging with the work and its consequences. What Fabiola proposes in her work is to take his claims for the orthopedic power of architecture seriously, and look at the vision of society it is therefore promoting. Although Le Corbusier’s example might be canonical, her argument is that the entire ... -
This conversation with Stéphanie Dadour evolves around her doctoral dissertation that studies architectural theory and practice in the end of 20th-century North America. We explore a particular chapter of this dissertation to continue a series started with Olivia Ahn and Karen Tongson, about the gendered spatial paradigm constituted by the American suburbia. Citing the works of Mary McLeod, Beatriz Colomina, Joel Sanders and other feminist/queer thinkers and architects, we address architectural elements proper to this paradigm, such as the lawn, the curtain, or the window as instances of gendered apparatuses. We conclude the conversation by examining anthropometric studies, as well ... -
In this conversation, Yael Lerer introduces us to her work as founder of Andalus Publishing, which used to translate Arabic literature and poetry (Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish, Lebanese Elias Khoury, Moroccan Muhammad Choukri, etc.) into Hebrew. The balancing act of this venture consists in gaining the trust from the authors—a polemic was thus created in Egypt when Yael approached some writers there—and preventing at all costs the normalization of what Yael herself calls the state of apartheid enforced upon Israel/Palestine by the Israeli government. We also discuss about Yael’s role in the foundation of the Balad, a Palestinian political party seeking ... -
Lucie Bacon and I had this conversation only a few days after she finished her second field trip in Bosnia-and-Herzegovina where her research took her to study the European Union politics of “externalization,” i.e. the ‘subcontracting’ of its (anti-)migration policies outside of the Shenghen Space. Lucie has visited some asylum centers, where numerous migrants wait to be granted their legal status, and detention centers, where migrant bodies are imprisoned prior to their expulsion. She collected numerous testimonies from migrants themselves, but also organizers, activists, administrative officials, etc. and tell us about them in this discussion. We also talk about her ... -
This conversation with Banu Bargu is centered around the concept of “weaponization of life” that she coins in her book, Starve and Immolate. In it, she describes political self-destructive practices as political practice, in particular in the context of the leftist prisoners’ fast death struggle in the 2000s Turkey. We associate to these practices the concept of human shield to which she also dedicated research. Through these various forms of voluntary incarnated precariousness, we discuss the spectacularization of the action, the economy of life implied by it, as well as the mode of biopolitical sovereignty against which it is deployed. Banu Bargu is ... -
We happily launched The Funambulist Magazine on August 13 at e-flux (New York) in the presence of several dozens of friends and intrigued readers. You can listen to the full presentation which includes my introduction to the magazine, as well as the three first issues, or specifically listen to each of the three presentations given by Sadia Shirazi about the militarization of Lahore (Funambulist Magazine 01/Sept15: “Militarized Cities”), Olivia Ahn about the American suburbia as a spatial apparatus producing gender (Funambulist Magazine 02/Nov15: “Suburban Geographies”), and Minh-Ha T. Pham about a particular high heel shoe that supposes the existence of ... -
Forcefully Displaced Bodies in Bosnia: From the 1992-95 War to Contemporary Fortress Europe The Funambulist PodcastThis conversation is the first one of an Archipelago series in the Western Balkans. Recorded in Sarajevo with Selma Porobić, it introduces the historical context of the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the ethnic cleansing of the Bosniak population by the Serbian militias, and the 2 million displaced people inside and outside the country. Twenty years after the Dayton Peace Agreements, many refugees have not yet returned, often because of local and regional strategies discouraging if not preventing this return. The second part of the conversation addresses the geographical position of the Western Balkans, at the gates of “Fortress ... -
This conversation is a walk with Mensur Demir in Sarajevo. By joining four buildings designed by Ivan Straus (Electrical Management Building, Holiday Inn, and the “Twin Towers”) that have all witnessed the end of Yugoslavia, the three-year long siege on the city, and its reconstruction. Along the path, Mensur gives us an architectural account of how the war shaped the city, and the city that shaped the war between 1992 and 1996. We however remain careful not to attribute the identity of the city solely on these traumatic years, during which the three main Bosnian ethnic communities (Muslim Bosniaks, Orthodox Serbs, and Catholic ... -
In this conversation with Ana Džokić, we address the local politics of space and architecture in the capital city of Serbia, and former capital city of Yugoslavia, Belgrade. We use Ana’s carrier as an architect to explore the evolution of the way the city is inhabited from what she calls “wild city” at the end of the 1990s (recalling two other Archipelago conversations in Mexico City and Cairo) to the most recent capitalist development (in particular the Belgrade Waterfront project). We also questions the role of architects and its evolution in this politics, from the position of technocrat to the one that orchestrates conversation about ... -
In this conversation, Budapest-based journalist and editor Tamás Bodoky unfolds for us the nationalist politics deployed by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán since the beginning of his second term in 2010. We begin with the establishment of a law allowing the government to easily control the press. We then evoke the reform of the Constitution that enforces Christian values and identity in the legal framework of the Hungarian society. But the most important part of the discussion questions these politics in relation to the important migratory movement of Central Asia and Middle East refugees through East Europe. The new hermetic ... -
This discussion with local architect Miloš Kosec about three (hi)stories of ruins in WWII Slovenia uses the structure of his Master’s thesis research on this topic. After an introduction about the sometimes problematic fascination one might develop for ruins, we begin our specific conversation with the example of the ruins of entire ethnic German areas in southern Slovenia emptied of their inhabitants after they were encouraged to move back to Germany by the Reich administration. The second example is found in the numerous medieval castles burnt by the partisans in their fight against the Axis in what appear to Miloš ... -
This conversation with Iva Marčetić is one of two recorded in Zagreb at the end of the Western Balkans series. Throughout this discussion, we talk about Iva’s engagement as a political activist in relation to her architectural training. Her main involvement is done through the Zagreb-based organization “The Right to the City,” that she describes through various struggles against the rampant privatization of the city. We conclude the conversation by evoking her participation to the anti-fascist movement, and its architectural implications. Iva Marčetić holds a Master degree in architecture from Architectural school, University of Zagreb. She has been a part of ... -
This conversation with Ana Dana Beroš—the last one of the Western Balkans series—addresses the two main migration routes to access “Fortress Europe,” the road through the Balkans, in particular through Croatia from where we recorded it, as well as the road through the Mediterranean Sea. We begin by describing the current means undertaken in Croatia in order to facilitate the route of refugees, as well as the obstacles encountered. In the second part of the conversation, we use Intermundia, the exhibition/book curated last year by Ana Dana to address the status of the Italian island of Lampedusa, considered as a European ... -
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 second November conversation in London about disobedience takes a conceptual approach to this legal notion with Elena Loizidou. Through her personal research, as well as the work she curated around this notion in a 2010 symposium and a 2013 book, we attempt to consider disobedience for the political subjectivity it involves vis-a-vis the law. We do so not solely through the canonical figure of the civil objection (Rosa Parks), but also through more complex examples involving notions of selfishness, privacy and apolitics in the work of Hannah Arendt, William Burroughs, Emma Goldman and Walter Benjamin. We also look at how ... -
“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… ... -
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 ... -
This conversation with Taysir Batniji evolves around one question: what is being a Palestinian artist, or rather, in what consists the delicate and complex negotiation between the urgency of a 70-year-old situation of systematic oppression and the necessity not to be essentialized by it. Between curators and critiques that often oscillate between judging his work as propaganda or thinking that it does not embody the victim’s narrative, Taysir reflects on Palestinianness and, in particular, its relationship to time. We discuss this dimension of his work through episodes of his life between Gaza and Paris, as well as through some of ... -
2.5 Million Refugees in Turkey: A Few Architectural and Linguistic Considerations The Funambulist PodcastThis 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 exceptionally recorded online so to be featured in the fourth issue of The Funambulist Magazine, Carceral Environments (Mar-Apr 2016), but was somehow reenacted at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal on March 6, 2016. Through it, Nasrin Himada gives us an introduction to prison abolitionism, not as a ready-made system that can replace the current carceral industrial complex but, rather, as a daily practice that starts with notions of the notions of individual, community, and accountability. Nasrin Himada is a writer, editor, and curator residing in Montréal. Her interdisciplinary research interests focus on the history of Palestinian cinema, art and ... -
This short conversation with Marjetka P. has the particularity to be recorded in the ‘thickness’ of the border between Slovenia and Croatia, where a new fence materializes and drastically filters the access to the Schengen space — Croatia is a member of the E.U. but not yet of Schengen. In this discussion in situ, we address the current situation both locally (i.e. in Slovenia) and more broadly, at the scale of what is legitimate to call “Fortress Schengen.” This conversation is followed by an even shorter one, recorded with Matija Kralj, who has been documenting the spatiality and activity of the Dobova refugee ... -
This conversation recorded under the tracks of the metro in Northern Paris, where a few hundreds of migrant and refugee persons have been living in the past few months, despite several “evacuations” by the French police. I talk with Timothy Perkins who is part of the movement Chapelle Debout (unrelated to Nuit Debout) organized in solidarity to the residents of this fragile encampment (formerly situated near “La Chapelle” metro station, now near the “Stalingrad” one). He explains to us the different moments of solidarity and heavy policing that are engaged in this particular site of the French capital. Timothy Perkins studied ... -
In this discussion, Sinthujan Varatharajah presents both his work as an organizer with the organization Flüchtlinge Willkommen (Refugees Welcome) in Berlin, as well as his research as a doctoral student about refugee camps in Germany. Beyond the description of the camps’ architecture, we discuss how the logic of humanitarianism in relation to the demagogic politics of European governments forms legally, spatially, and narratively these extraterritorial spaces of exclusion. Sinthujan Varatharajah is a doctoral student in Political Geography at University College London. His analysis the spatial politics of asylum and refugee resistance to encampment in Germany. He holds a MSc. from the ... -
This conversation with Nacira Guénif-Souilamas was recorded at the University of Paris VIII (Saint-Denis) for The Funambulist Magazine 05 (May-June 2016): “Design & Racism.” It opens a series of conversations on Archipelago about this important topic. Nacira is an anthropologist and sociologist, author and editor of four books examining structural racism in France. Such a specific system of legal targeting, administrative discrimination, urbanistic discrimination, stigmatizing imaginaries, etc. is the topic of this conversation. Nacira Guénif-Souilamas is an anthropologist and sociologist, author and editor of four books examining structural racism in France: Des « beurettes » aux descendantes d’immigrants nord-africains (Grasset, 2000), Des beurettes (Hachette Pluriel, 2003), Les féministes ... -
This second conversation of the series complementing the latest issue of The Funambulist Magazine dedicated to “Design & Racism” borrows its title from Audre Lorde’s words cited by Mabel O. Wilson at the beginning of the “Critical Dialogues on Race and Modern Architecture” that she organized at Columbia University in February 2016. Throughout this discussion, we talk about architecture’s historical and contemporary contribution to the American structural racism against Black bodies. Professor Mabel O. Wilson teaches architectural design and history/theory courses at Columbia University’s GSAPP. She is also appointed as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) ... -
Design & Racism 3: History of African American Uprisings from Watts to Ferguson The Funambulist PodcastAs the series “Design & Racism” continues, it would be an omissive mistake not to address some of the numerous historical movements undertaken against structural racism. This is why, in this conversation, Donna Murch gives us an historical outline of the African American uprisings from Watts in Los Angeles in 1965 to Ferguson, MO in 2014 after the murder of Michael Brown by a police officer. We also discuss about the progressive militarization of the police accomplished in the historical context of the so-called “war on drugs” that had drastic consequences on the violent suppression of the Black Lives Matter movement ... -
This conversation with Christina Heatherton and Jordan T. Camp evolves around the content of the recently published book that they edited, Policing the Planet. By evoking the numerous interviews and articles of/by intellectuals and activists, we address the inherent violence of policing, as well as its specific politics in the United States through the “broken windows” doctrine and the character of William Bratton for instance. We also discuss about the various forms of resistance organized against the structural racism that the police enforces, including the abolition of the police altogether. Christina Heatherton is an American Studies scholar and historian of antiracist social movements. Her work ... -
This conversation with Jessica Myers occurred in the context of her recording of a second season of the podcast Here There Be Dragons about the way city residents experience neighborhoods in various way. While the first season was dedicated to New York (in particular regarding gentrification), the second one will be about Paris and the notion of safety and identities. After Jessica interviewed me (absent here, but fragments will be included in the second season), she returned the favor and talked to me about this project and a few of the responses that she had collected through the 31 other ... -
From September 26 to December 15, 2014, tens of thousands of predominantly young Hong Kong residents occupied night and day the strategic sites of Admiralty (central business district on the North shore of the island) and Mong Kok (commercial core of Kowloon). These protests in the lineage of the revolutionary movements started in 2011 by what was commonly called the “Arab Spring,” then followed by various “occupations” in the Western World, occurred in opposition to the reform of the Hong Kong electoral system by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC). This series of five episodes of conversations with ... -
From September 26 to December 15, 2014, tens of thousands of predominantly young Hong Kong residents occupied night and day the strategic sites of Admiralty (central business district on the North shore of the island) and Mong Kok (commercial core of Kowloon). These protests in the lineage of the revolutionary movements started in 2011 by what was commonly called the “Arab Spring,” then followed by various “occupations” in the Western World, occurred in opposition to the reform of the Hong Kong electoral system by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC). This series of five episodes of conversations ... -
From September 26 to December 15, 2014, tens of thousands of predominantly young Hong Kong residents occupied night and day the strategic sites of Admiralty (central business district on the North shore of the island) and Mong Kok (commercial core of Kowloon). These protests in the lineage of the revolutionary movements started in 2011 by what was commonly called the “Arab Spring,” then followed by various “occupations” in the Western World, occurred in opposition to the reform of the Hong Kong electoral system by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC). This series of five episodes of conversations with ... -
From September 26 to December 15, 2014, tens of thousands of predominantly young Hong Kong residents occupied night and day the strategic sites of Admiralty (central business district on the North shore of the island) and Mong Kok (commercial core of Kowloon). These protests in the lineage of the revolutionary movements started in 2011 by what was commonly called the “Arab Spring,” then followed by various “occupations” in the Western World, occurred in opposition to the reform of the Hong Kong electoral system by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC). This series of five episodes of conversations with ... -
This conversation with Chanelle Adams starts by addressing colonial and decolonial methodologies of knowledge production. It then proceeds to describe the history of Madagascar, as well as debunk the (neo)colonial idea of the island being a “terra nullius” as described by Western environmentalist activists. The core of this discussion consists in Chanelle describing her research about the cultural, traditional, social, and political dimensions of medicinal plants in Madagascar, that she calls “pharmacy-gasy.” “Because health is intimately linked to our social lives, I believe it is the ideal intersection to examine power, knowledge, and materials,” she writes. Chanelle Adams approaches her research ... -
This conversation with Eyal Weizman was recorded in February 2017 in order to be featured as a main component of the 12th issue of The Funambulist Magazine, entitled “Designed Destructions.” In it we address both descriptively and analytically the work of Forensic Architecture, a research agency at Goldsmiths, University of London, that he founded and directs, gathering architects, artists, filmmakers, and authors to investigate geopolitical crimes in which architecture or territorial components can be approached as witnesses and evidences. Although the agency’s investigations involves a variety of geographies (Guatemala, Syria, Serbia, Pakistan, etc.), this conversation mostly focuses on Palestine in general, and ... -
Politics of Blackness, Memorialization of Slavery, and Racial Denials in France The Funambulist PodcastThis conversation with Crystal Marie Fleming revolves around her recently published book, Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France (Temple University Press, 2017). Through it, we discuss about the similarities and difference through which anti-blackness operates in the United States and in France, the internal debates to the French Black community (in particular the Caribbean one) as to how memorialize slavery, the various forms of denials France manifests regarding its historical and contemporary forms of colonialism, as well as the way current French political antiracist activism succeeds in influencing the national debate. Crystal Marie Fleming is a writer, speaker and Assistant Professor ... -
Samia Henni and I recorded this conversation after a visit of her exhibition, Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria at ETH University in Zurich. In it, we attempt to introduce the historical context of the Algerian Revolution between 1945 and 1962, as well as the French architecture of counter-revolution designed against it, in particular the so-called “regrouping” camps in which the population of entire villages of rural Algeria were forcefully relocated by the colonial army. We also discuss of the challenges of curating such an exhibition when most of the available documents come from the colonizer side, as ... -
Virilism, Clandestinity, and Alternative Modes of Being Queer and Arab in France The Funambulist PodcastThis conversation with Mehammed Amadeus Mack is centered on his book Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture (Fordham University Press, 2017). In it, we discuss two types of injunctions. The first one is addressed to queer Arabs and Banlieusards; it is produced by homonormativity that imagines limited modes of being queer centered around the act of coming out and the centralized urban territoriality it ensues, in opposition of clandestine and peripheral praxis of homosexuality. The second injunction we discuss is a (homo)nationalist European one that consider Muslim queers to be in necessary conflict with their communities while setting the ... -
This conversation with Mayanthi Fernando constitutes a new episode in a series of discussions with US-based researchers whose terrain of political investigations is situated in France. After Crystal Marie Flemming and Mehammed Amadeus Mack, Mayanthi describes her methodology and her work that she articulated in her book, The Republic Unsettled that was published in 2014. We talk about the ideological, legal, and discursive framework through which secularism (laicité) is approached, and often politically instrumentalized in the French Republic. In a second part, we describe the aspirations of the Muslim French community between “a right to difference” and “a right to indifference,” ... -
This conversation with Wendy Matsumura is released along a short report about current movements of protest against the US army’s ubiquitous presence in Okinawa, published in The Funambulist blog. Wendy takes us through the chronology of domination that Ryukyuans (and subesquently Okinawans) have experienced since the 17th century and the various forms of resistance that were opposed to it. From the Satsuma Clan’s claim on the Ryukyu Kingdom, to the Japanese annexation of it, to the US army’s occupation, and finally the current situation of a US imperialism negotiated with the successive Japanese governments and their varying degree of nationalism, we try ... -
This conversation with Sara Farris was recorded on August 7, 2017 to be featured as a transcript in the 13th issue of The Funambulist Magazine (Sept-Oct. 2017), “Queers, Feminists & Interiors.” It attempts to link the work she presents in her book, In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism (Duke University Press, 2017) with the violence against women that femonationalist discourses deliberately ignore (as these violences are exercised through what we could call “a universalist patriarchy”): domestic violence. The conversation first presents the political concept of femonationalism in the context of Europe, and then proceeds to describe the ... -
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 Francesca Russello Ammon is built around her book, Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape (2016), which retraces the political history of the bulldozer by the United States during World War II (used in the Pacific War by the SeaBees) and immediately following it in the massive engineering of the U.S. territory in cities and between them. This discussion can act as an addition to the contents featured in The Funambulist 17 (May-June 2018) “Weaponized Infrastructure.” Francesca Russello Ammon is a cultural historian of urban planning and the built environment. Her research focuses on the social, material, and cultural ... -
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 ... -
In this conversation with Léopold Lambert in the Center for Applied Legal Studies at Wits University (Johannesburg) that he directs, Tshepo Madlingozi exposes the many reasons that made the 1996 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) a reinforcement of settler colonialism and white supremacy in South Africa. Associating the theoretical framework of Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness with a legal examination of the way “transitional justice” has been operating since the official end of the Apartheid in 1994, Tshepo shows us that actual decolonization of what he calls “the country with no name” has never been on the table. Tshepo Madlingozi is a ... -
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 ... -
Léopold met with Nadia Ben Youssef during the second Black and Palestinian Solidarity conference in Naarm (Melbourne) on Indigenous Wurundjeri land, organized by Gary Foley and Suzannah Henty in November 2019. In this conversation, Nadia recounts the history of the 1955 Bandung Conference through the perspective of her grandfather, Tunisian revolutionary Salah Ben Youssef who was representing Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco in the fight against French colonialism. The discussion addresses the way the Bandung spirit was broken by France’s neocolonial strategies that manufactured new types of dependencies for former colonies in Africa. They conclude the conversation with considerations of what ... -
In this conversation recorded in our office, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn answers Léopold Lambert’s questions about the way she interprets or/and constructs various kinds of archives through her artistic work. The first part of the conversation addresses diasporic archives through her project The Making of an Archive (2014-now), which undertakes to digitize photographs from immigrant families in Canada and Sweden. They then proceed to interrogate the colonial archives in Jacqueline’s work following her 2015 residency in the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm that led to the exhibition Black Atlas (2016). Through phrases such as “How did the world came to Europe” ... -
In this interview by Léopold Lambert, Mpho Matsipa describes the spirit and contents of the exhibition she curated in 2018. Entitled African Mobilities: This is not a Refugee Camp Exhibition, this powerfully-curated gathering of artworks provides the bases of a conversation about the notions of mobilities and temporalities in the context of the African continent, from the mind-expanding maps of the Chimurenga Library and the cartographic entanglements by Dana Whariba, Thembinkosi Goniwe and Nolan Oswald Dennis to the futurist vision of Olalekan Jeyifous and Wale Lawal. Mpho Matsipa received her PhD in Architecture from UC Berkeley. She is Adjunct Assistant Professor ... -
On December 12, 2019, the Chicago Architecture Biennial invited us to organize an event around our book The Funambulist by its Readers: Political Geographies from Chicago and Elsewhere. We had the luck and honor to hold this event with the five Chicago-based activists (Patricia Nguyen, Jesse Mumm, Maira Khwaja, Benji Hart, and Anjulie Rao) we commissioned specifically for this book to describe the political struggles they have been a part of against the municipality’s policing, neoliberal and racist policies, in particular during the two terms of Rahm Emmanuel (who was one of the initiators of the Chicago Architecture Biennial). This ... -
This podcast episode is a bit different from the ones we usually publish — and not just because of our new opening credits edited by Andrei Popoviciu! Taking advantage of his visit in Chicago, Léopold talked with our past contributor Imran Mohammad. In November 2017, he wrote a text for us about the Rohingya genocide that he fled while he was living his fourth year of detention in an Australian camp detaining hundreds of exiled people on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. A few weeks later and while many detainees organized forms of revolt, the camp ceased to operate and ... -
There is something significantly different to record a conversation about the politics of a given neighborhood in the calm of an office or in the neighborhood itself — even if the sock Léopold added to his microphone ultimately proves not to be the most efficient windbreak! We begin this important conversation with Colin Prescod in front of Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, London, two and a half years after the massive fire that killed 72 residents (predominantly members of the racialized working class) and displaced hundreds on June 14, 2017. Although the source of the fire was accidental, its propagation ... -
This conversation between Walter Bgoya and Margarida Waco reflects on the notion of progressive publishing in a post-colonial African context. Advocating for literature as a weapon of liberation, Bgoya examines three key moments in Tanzania’s modern history: colonialism, independency, and neoliberalism. In his account of the political framework, from the structural adjustments imposed by the World Bank and the IMF in the 80’s forcing the country on its knees, via the socialist policies deployed by the founding father of the Republic of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, to the struggles of ideas that emerged during independency and until today still perpetuate the ... -
On the day of the launch of Palestine, Today, a new project by Visualizing Palestine, and three days before the 72nd anniversary of the Nakba, we are releasing the 137th episode of our regular podcast series with regular contributor and Visualizing Palestine founding partner, Ahmad Barclay. Palestine, Today is an interactive map and counter-mapping tool that describes the past and present of 1,196 towns, villages, and cities before and after the Nakba. Ahmad Barclay is an architect and visual communicator based in Beirut, Lebanon. He is a founding partner with Visualizing Impact and Visualizing Palestine, as well as an Al-Shabaka policy ... -
In this conversation recorded to be featured in The Funambulist 30 (July-August 2020) “REPARATIONS,” Hawaiian activist Edward Halealoha Ayau describes the signification of the Return of Hawaiian kūpunas (ancestors) to their homeland, as well as the training, strategies, and rituals that the Return of over 6,000 remains and cultural items have necessitated these past 30 years. Edward Halealoha Ayau is ‘Ōiwi (Hawaiian), a 56-year- old father of four daughters and a son. For the last 30 years, he has led efforts to repatriate iwi kūpuna (ancestral Hawaiian skeletal remains), moepū (funerary possessions) and mea kapu (sacred objects) as the Executive Director ... -
This conversation with Zoé Samudzi was recorded to operate as a complement to her text “Reparative Futurities: Thinking From the Ovaherero and Nama Colonial Genocide,” commissioned for and published in The Funambulist 30 (July-August 2020) “REPARATIONS.” Zoé begins by contextualizing the history of the first 20th century genocide, which was committed by the German settler colonial army against the Ovaherero and Nama nations in what is now Namibia. We then talks of the various forms of coalition settler colonial powers practice with each other, but also how the struggles against them can, in turn, form large solidarity fronts worldwide. Finally, ... -
This episode features Ellie and JN, two members of Lausan, a collective of activists, writers and artists from Hong Kong. Through writing, events and activism, their work articulates the struggle for Hong Kong emancipation in nuanced and complex terms, examining both Chinese and American imperialisms while questioning Hong Kong political state of being as well as activists, political positions, and tactics. They also discuss collective and global emancipation in a way that allows to imagine internationalist solidarities not only worldwide (whether in the West or in the Global South) but also with people in mainland China. For generations, Hongkongers have resisted ... -
Invoking the global Black uprising, this conversation between Margarida Waco and Awa Konaté examines Anti-Blackness and the different ways in which institutional and structural violence against Black and Brown bodies is normalised and manifested across the Nordics, i.e. Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland in particular. The conversation draws upon Scandinavian colonial history and Denmark’s role in slave trading as frameworks allowing for a critical examination of the cultural and political languages and iconographies associated with the Nordic Paradigm in an attempt to challenge, and finally dismantle the concept of Nordic Exceptionalism. Awa Konaté is a London and Copenhagen based Danish-Ivorian writer ... -
This conversation was recorded to be featured in our March-April 2021 issue “The Paris Commune and the World” for the 150th anniversary of the Commune. In 2016, Geo Maher published a book entitled Building the Commune (Verso & Jacobin) that describes the last ten years of communal councils’ existence in Venezuela during Hugo Chávez’s presidency. Inspired both by the Paris Commune and Indigenous and Maroon praxes, the Venezuelan communes constitute a key example of the political formations we are trying to analyse throughout this issue. Geo Maher is a Philadelphia-based writer, organizer, and educator. He is the author of three books: ... -
In this conversation, we talk about Harsha Walia’s new fantastic book, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Haymarket, 2021), which draws an international map of the border imperialist regime in its geographic, historic, and legal complexities. We then proceed in trying to envision the various forms of internationalist solidarities that emerge in the struggle against this global regime, following in particular Indigenous and/or Black resistance. Harsha Walia is the award-winning author of Undoing Border Imperialism (2013). Trained in the law, she is a community organizer and campaigner in migrant justice, anti-capitalist, feminist, and anti-imperialist movements, ... -
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 was recorded to be published in The Funambulist 36 (July-August 2021), “They Have Clocks, We Have Time.” Waiting is a particular temporal praxis, whose political dimension is more likely to be missed by those who make people wait than by those who have to wait for a visa, for food, for access to the city, etc. Shahram Khosravi shares with us some of his reflections on this action of waiting; its Kafkaian dimension, but also its revolutionary potential. Shahram Khosravi is a former taxi driver and currently an accidental Professor of Anthropology at Stockholm University. Khosravi is the author of ... -
When, in October 2021, we interviewed Priya Ange and Anita Kittery for our francophone show “Diasporas et Imaginaires des Luttes” about the Tamil diaspora from Puducherry or Tamil Nadu at large in France, we relied a lot on the work of Jessica Namakkal, who dedicated a book to “the making and unmaking of French India.” We are therefore happy to provide you with an anglophone conversation with her about French colonialism on the Indian Subcontinent. This is part of a broader effort to render the complexity to the Subcontinent’s recent history, which is usually depicted under the sole and uniform ... -
In May 2021, Mohamad Amer Meziane published his first book, Des empires sous la terre: Histoire écologique et raciale de la sécularisation (Subterranean Empires: Ecological and Racial History of Secularization). We speak with him about the ambitious work he develops in this book, linking European secularization (and Europe’s definition of what constitutes religion) with colonial extractivism from the first industrial revolution to the alteration of the world’s climate. Mohamad Amer Meziane holds a PhD in Philosophy from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. He is currently a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Religion Culture and Public and the Institute of African studies at Columbia ... -
Quito Swan’s forthcoming book Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-colonialism, and the African World (NYU Press, March 2022) beautifully encompasses the type of internationalist solidarity our 39th issue The Ocean… From the Black Atlantic to the Sea of Islands would like to convey. As such, this interview about the struggles of liberation in Melanesia (in particular West Papua, Kanaky, and Vanuatu) constitutes a cornerstone of the issue, for which we are deeply grateful to Quito. Hailing from the island of Bermuda, Quito Swan is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. An award-winning historian of Black internationalism, he ... -
This conversation between Shivangi Mariam Raj and Steven Salaita reflects over Palestine by examining how settler colonial logics are coded within language — ranging from the limits of human rights framework to conditional solidarities, from visual grammars of sanitized victimhood to academic censorship, and more. We also discuss the defiant vocabulary of resistance, as embodied by Palestinian armed rebels, prisoners, and scholars. Steven Salaita is a Palestinian scholar and public speaker based in the U.S. He has previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and Virginia Tech. He is the author of several books, including “Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where ... -
For the release of Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi’s book, Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (UC Press) on April 19, 2022, we are proposing this interview of hers about some aspects of her research, in particular the articulation of this concept of “refugee settlers” or the ways through which both U.S. and Israeli governments have spectacularized and instrumentalized Vietnamese refugees resettlement. We end the conversation with the geographic image of the archipelago associated with the Vietnamese notion of nước as visions for decolonial imaginaries. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is an assistant professor of Asian American ... -
This relatively long conversation with Robbie McVeigh & Bill Rolston only evokes fragments of their comprehensive book “Anois ar theacht an tSamhraidh”: Ireland, Colonialism, and the Unfinished Revolution, which resituates Irish history within the global history of colonialism. We talk about Gorta Mór (the Great Hunger), the Irish Revolution, the Partition, as well as the contemporary forms of struggle and internationalist solidarity in the North of Ireland. Special thanks to Osloob for his precious help with editing the quality of this episode’s sound. Robbie McVeigh & Bill Rolston are the authors of “Anois ar theacht an tSamhraidh”: Ireland, Colonialism, and the Unfinished Revolution (Beyond the ... -
This interview of Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese is meant as a complement to the conversation with Jan Turner in our 44th issue (Nov-Dec 2022), The Desert. Entitled “The Impact of a Life (and a Death): Colonial Encounters and Aboriginal Desert Practices,” this conversation revolves around the life and death of Aboriginal leader and artist Mr. Ward, whose death was investigated by the project founded by Suvendrini and Joseph: Deathscapes. Together we discuss the various methodologies they use in this project that documents Indigenous and migrant deaths in detention by settler states (in particular Australia), as well as the crucial need to practice ...
