SHANNON MATTERN is a theorist and professor of media, design, architecture, and anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York.

In this lively episode, Mattern asks: what metaphors, tools, and projects are needed to imagine ways of building and repairing our cities more collaboratively? She shares her expansive interests—from computation, interconnection, and urban intelligences to thinking with trees, writing as grafting, supporting public libraries, and redesigning the academy.

Mattern is the author of multiple books and essays. Her most recent book is A City Is Not A Computer: Other Urban Intelligences (Princeton 2021). She is also a contributing writer for Places, an online journal of architecture, urbanism, and landscape design.

https://wordsinspace.net/
twitter @shannonmattern

Friendship as method and medium is the heart of this conversation between Marina Zurkow and Una Chaudhuri, artists-academics behind "Dear Climate," a New York-based art collective that engages with climate change through public installations, design, experimental pedagogies, and playful toolkits for multispecies survival. Marina and Una share stories of early teaching in the field of Animal Studies, arriving at the right name and mode of address for the collective, and the many friendships that have deepened their shared practice and aesthetico-political commitments to multispecies worlds over the last decade.

Two rivers situate our conversation with two friends, poet/artist Cecilia Vicuña and art historian/curator Sarah Lookofsky. El Río Mapocho begins in the Andes Mountains and runs through the city of Santiago, Chile where Cecilia was born, while the River Akerselva begins in Maridal Lake and flows through waterfalls and former industrial areas of Oslo where Sarah recently moved. What might we learn to hear if we attend to the interweaving languages of these ancient waters and the many lives, joys, brutalities, and deaths they carry, remember, and resist? In this episode, Cecilia and Sarah talk about multispecies connection, histories of contamination and colonialism, quantum co-evolution, listening with fingers, dancing with mussels, speaking with red wing thrushes, and the "explosive commitment to the beauty of being alive."

ceciliavicuna
sarahlookofsky