![]() ![]() They bite at Party headquarters, and they bite us here in our basement.” If there’s one thing that unites us during the blockade, it’s that. One character already knows that Party officials and Hermitage employees are living and dying two totally different versions of the story: “The living have lice, and the dead, too. Two lovers slowly starve and go mad-they’re not “essential workers” deemed worthy of ration cards. They are invisible characters in the final installment of Living Pictures, a short play about that very Hermitage scene. In Air Raid, one resorts to “chew on iron” and all six parts of a string of poems are spent in a panic: “Ration cards missing! / Ration cards missing!”Īnother ugly truth of blockade life, unspoken in official versions, is lice. One speaker in Living Pictures describes in halting lines: “…throbbing you lick the bowl clean weep scan the table howl lick again.” Another laughs at how eating coffee grounds has become a rare treat. In both books, hunger for anything that even remotely resembles food illustrates the shame of blockade life. ![]() There’s no way to reference the Siege without talking about food. The dead even seep into contemporary sections of Living Pictures: “Maybe we’d pathetically caress each other again, or maybe we’d die instantly, like the homeless during an early freeze, and they’d collect our bodies in the morning.” Imagine skin papery from thirst, gums rotting from scurvy and dystrophy. Imagine curators and art historians giving tours to sailors, describing absent paintings from memory in exchange for scraps of charred bread. Imagine the grandiose halls hung with empty frames: valuable art shipped away for protection while Hermitage staff hide in the basement next to the frozen corpses of their colleagues. Now imagine the Hermitage in the context of forty degrees below zero, no electricity, no running water, frozen and bursting sewage pipes, air raids and bombings, anti-aircraft guns, shelling, destroyed buildings, rats, starvation in the hundreds of thousands. Egyptian antiquities, Italian renaissance, Dutch masters, impressionists, cubists, the canon of the art world housed in six buildings, including the Winter Palace, a 460-room mansion built for Catherine herself. Founded by Catherine the Great, Russia’s longest ruling woman, and containing one of-if not the-largest art collections in the world. Quechua Elder Maria Querar shares teachings about Indigenous plant medicines, urban and rural relationships to Land, as well as the Quechua principles of relationality, reciprocity, and responsibility towards human and non-human world.Īlong-side Mama Maria’s teachings, Enrico Trevisi, a Venezuelan political ecologist who was based in Vancouver for many years, speaks about the political dimensions of waste at a local and global scale, and complexify our (unevenly distributed) complicity in the structural violence of the current global system.The State Hermitage Museum, gem of Saint Petersburg, pride of imperial and Soviet Russia. It dives into the ecologic, technocratic, social and spiritual dimensions of extractivism and waste. The first episode of the series, spoken in Spanish. This podcast series is a sonic journey and is supported by musical soundscapes, so we recommend the use of headphones, an attentive heart and an open mind.Įpisode 1: – The Weight of Waste with Mama Maria and Enrico Trevisi The focus is not reaching consensus or totalizing solutions about the current intersecting social and ecological collapses, but rather to have the voices support one another in the (de)construction of a non-linear story.Įach episode has three elements, with two guests and narration from Azul to braid the podcast together. All episodes take the form of a braided conversation where intergenerational and intercultural voices share sonic space. This is a trilingual podcast series rooted in critical conversations around justice, healing, and sustainability that extend between what is known as Vancouver and Latin America. ![]()
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