fugitive frequency episode 10: Vishnu’s the Issue

Vishnu Vardhani Rajan is the issue of this episode; a Helsinki-based performance artist and body-philosopher. Our interview, recorded in March 2021, is interspersed with fantastic Telegu film songs and cheeky advertising jingles.

An addendum message is from representatives from the EZLN — the Zapatistas —currently in Europe, having arriving in Madrid in August to mark the 500th anniversary of Colombus ‘discovering’ the Americas. I caught up with a delegation of women at a symposium in Turku: ‘Gender, Nature and Survival’ organised by Power from Below. Special thanks to Erwin from the Armadillo Collective for making this possible.

Image of Vamp Master Brown wearing an earring made of crystalized menstrual blood is based on a fotozine by Heidi Lunabba.

Media used in the episode:

fugitive frequency episode 04: Corona Realism

Etienne Suvasa: GNU head

Another sketchy, and somewhat hastily assembled, audio essay. It is now a year since I returned to Europe in the midst of the lockdown in Berlin. To mark my ‘corona aniversário’ I dig into some of the issues surrounding the stalled development of the patent-free ‘Linux Vaccine’ by a co-hort of university-based researchers in Helsinki and as discussed in this thought-provoking article by Ilari Kaila and Joona-Hermanni Mäkinen published in Jacobin in February. The ‘Great Vaccine Race’ provides an entry point to think about some of the issues raised by sociologist and design theorist Benjamin H. Bratton, in his recent call ‘For Planetary Governance’, taking into account anticolonial perspectives…which leads us to the Zapatistas who are sailing to Europe this summer! Also Schools for Chiapas are collecting funds to support the Zapatista’s mobile plant medicine initiative, El Vivero Muy Otro– Medicine for our Bodies; Medicine for the Earth.

Links to music, media and resources used in the program are below.
GNU mascot illustration by Etienne Suvasa circa 1996.