Podcasts from Radio Web MACBA
Published
We are proud to share a selection of podcasts from Radio Web MACBA co-produced with BEK. The episodes are part of the Son[i]a series, featuring artists who participated in BEK’s symposium programme in Bergen in 2025: Ameneh Solati, Rehana Zaman and Carol Stampone. These conversations extend themes explored during the symposium, including collective practices, ecological thinking, and situated forms of knowledge.
Son[i]a #452 Ameneh Solati
Image: Wetlands Beyond Water: Performance lecture by Ameneh Solati during BEK symposium 2025
The Only Lasting Truth is Change: Voice, Seed, Brutality Photo: Nayara Leite
In this podcast, Ameneh Solati reflects on the marshes as revolutionary landscapes in southern Iraq, the relationship between environment and resistance, and the challenges of researching a territory that remains partially inaccessible and historically underdocumented. The conversation also touches on collective spatial investigation, collaborations with activists and communities, and experimental forms of mapping that rethink the relationship between humans, water and land.
The degradation and near-destruction of the Mesopotamian Marshes in the 1990s is often narrated either as an ecological tragedy or as retaliation by Saddam Hussein’s regime against rebellious populations. Iraqi-Iranian research-based artist, writer and architect Ameneh Solati (Iran, 1988) proposes another reading. Her work situates the drainage of the wetlands within a longer history of environmental governance that extends from British colonial engineering schemes to Ba‘athist technopolitics, where water infrastructures like canals, dams and diversions became tools to reshape territory and discipline its inhabitants. By transforming the marshlands, the state(s) sought to render the landscape legible and controllable while undermining the autonomy of the Maʻdān, whose ways of life had long depended on the ecological complexity and mobility of the wetlands.
Tracing this history from the perspective of the wetlands themselves, Ameneh Solati explores the entanglement of land, water and political power, and how these histories of ecological violence resonate today. Moving between spatial research and artistic practice, her work draws on archives, oral testimonies, fragments of history and Islamic cosmology to construct alternative narratives of place.
Conversation: Anna Ramos. Script and sound production: pantea. Voice over: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros. Sounds: RWM sound library.
08.04.2026
64 min
English
Coproduced by Sonic Acts and BEK.
Son[i]a #450 Rehana Zaman
Image: Gneiss: an extended live performance by Touki and Rehana Zaman with Daiyen Jone Castro during BEK symposium 2025 The Only Lasting Truth is Change: Voice, Seed, Brutality Photo: Nayara Leite
In this podcast, Rehana Zaman talks about diaspora, collectivity, and infrastructures of care; about the studio as a social testing ground, and about film as both process and result. They reflect on alliances, representation, polyvocality, and authorship. They also discuss institutional agendas and the political urgency of coming together. They consider how to sustain the power of such encounters without slipping into empty gestures, and how to maintain artistic practices grounded in listening, humour, responsibility, and being together.
The work of artist, filmmaker and educator Rehana Zaman (b. Heckmondwike, 1982) unfolds across film, performance, writing, group work and collective processes sustained over time. From a feminist, situated perspective, Zaman weaves together polyphonic strategies that transcend fixed identity categories, using collaboration as a political condition of doing/making. Her practice attends closely to psychosocial dynamics in hostile contexts, seeking to create environments of relationality, intimacy, and shared temporal experience that can sustain communal life.
Rehana Zaman’s work operates as a testing ground for practicing, questioning, and reimagining ways of living together, where film sometimes operates as a strategy, and sometimes as a ruse. This working and cooperative environment is rich in oblique movements between registers, and it revolves around responsibility and the politics of representation in both form and process: from fragmented framings of the body that resist capture, to the material textures of analogue film, and editing as a site where affect, narrative, and power are actively negotiated.
Conversation: Anna Ramos. Script and sound production: Albert Tarrats. Voice over: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros. Sounds: RWM sound library.
19.03.2026
78 min
English
Coproduced by BEK.
Son[i]a #447 Carol Stampone
On Change, Time and the Burnout Society: A performative lecture or participatory poem by Carol Stampone during BEK symposium 2025 The Only Lasting Truth is Change: Voice, Seed, Brutality Photo: Nayara Leite
In this podcast, Carol Stampone speaks about writing as her first experience of belonging, motherhood as a deeply transformative and often traumatic process, and the politics of empathy and compassion. She reflects on the importance of asking better questions rather than seeking definitive answers, inviting us to stay with uncertainty, to think with others, and to imagine forms of living, caring, and creating that remain open, relational, and unfinished.
Carol Stampone moves between writing, philosophy, and art, approaching writing not only as a literary form but as a way of being with others. Born in Brazil and based in Bergen, Norway, she draws on feminist and decolonial thought and on methodologies such as escrevivência, lugar de fala (site of speech), and coracionar, thinking and feeling together as an embodied mode of knowing that recognizes emotion as constitutive of thought. These approaches foreground situated knowledge, lived experience, and forms of thinking that emerge as much from affect and embodiment as from literature and theory.
Shaped by migration, love, displacement, class, and identity, Stampone’s trajectory reflects a sustained inquiry into belonging and selfhood. Influenced by thinkers including Hannah Arendt, María Zambrano, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Conceição Evaristo, Bracha L. Ettinger, and Octavia Butler, she resists fixed identities, approaching subjectivity as relational and contingent, formed through race, gender, nationality, motherhood, and material conditions.
Conversation: Anna Ramos. Script: Maite Muñoz. Sound production: pantea. Voice over: Javiera Cadiz. Sounds: RWM Working Group.
04.02.2026
77 min
Catalan
Coproduced by BEK.
Top images: 1) Rehana Zaman, film still from “Jo Kherray so Khaey“ 2) Ameneh Solati 3) Carol Stampone Photo: Thor Brødreskift