Episode 23 – "How Can I Talk About This Violence Without Being Violent?": An Interview with Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński & Naomi Rincón Gallardo

In this episode, Sefanit Habtom and Sigrid Roman interview Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński and Naomi Rincón Gallardo, creators of the Formaldehyde Trip and Unearthing. In Conversation, respectively. Naomi and Belinda generously share their artistic decision-making processes, how they see art as resistance, and speak to future generations of Black and Indigenous peoples. Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński is a writer and artist living in Vienna/Austria. Grounded in Black feminist theory, she is interested in memory and Black radical imagination. Her artistic work combines photography, collage, video, and performance. Since October 2015 she is a candidate in the PhD-in-Practice Program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna working on the project The Non-Human. The Believer. The Alien –  Unsettling Innocence. In the frame of this project she engages artistically and theoretically with the performativity of Blackness in relation to Austrian coloniality. Here she confronts three historic scenes that involve Blackness in Austria with new approaches from the field of Black studies.   Naomi Rincón Gallardo. (1979) Based in Mexico City, currently living in Vienna. Understanding research as a trans-disciplinary crafty fabrication, her work addresses initiatives concerning the creation of counter-worlds within neocolonial settings. Through masquerade lenses she creates a place between radical alternatives, fantasy and crises of beliefs. Rincón Gallardo integrates her interest in music, D.I.Y aesthetics, speculative fiction, theater games, humor, decolonial and anti-racist feminisms, queer theory and critical pedagogy into her work. She is a current candidate for the PhD in Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.