Overexposed Podcast with Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee featuring Angela Chan
Tuesday 17 August 13:53
In the latest Overexposed Podcast episode, presented and produced in collaboration with Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee, Sonic Acts artist-in-residence Angela Chan goes over her artistic research practice as a 'creative climate change communicator'. For Chan, this means focusing on systemic relations, especially abuses of power. It also means engaging with multiple perspectives of climate justice: the everyday agency of marginalised communities, as well as the social effects and colonial histories of extraction and pollutants.
Practically, these orientations have translated, along with youth-focused field trips and speculative fiction groups, into 'living room conversations'. Hosted by Chan, their goal has been to discuss climate and environment related issues, while allowing the exchange to meander without necessarily working towards an outcome – instead finding support for anxieties and grief in a safe and cosy space. In this episode, Chan invites us to think about how moss and lichen act as a kind of biotechnology and an indicator of our part in an ecology that can be mediated differently than through embedded and conflictual power systems. The “squidgy being” is not only a monitor, but, like Chan’s conversations, a dedication to softness. Materiality is central to Chan’s OVEREXPOSED residency, which maps the lasting effects of tear gas. Chan tells us that while research has shown how human bodies interact with and react to the chemical weapon, the looseness of the pollutant – the way it seeps into water cycles and becomes a degrading hyper structure – is underexamined. Chan’s multifaceted and nonlinear mediations are a way of manifesting the otherwise indiscernible. The Overexposed Podcast can be found on preferred podcast platforms. About OVEREXPOSED OVEREXPOSED is a home-based residency programme from Sonic Acts, in which six artists and researchers investigate pollution and its effects on everything living and non-living in a period of remote artistic research.