14 AUG 2023 · Referring to the Camiñando (walking) proposition of artist Lygia Clark, based on the act of cutting along a moebius strip of paper, Brazilian psychoanalyst, theorist and art curator Suely Rolnik interrogates the inextricable play of familiar forms and emergent forces, the embrace of the uncanny and the importance of body knowing in decolonizing the unconscious and freeing subjectivity from the shackles of the 'miserable life' offered by capitalism. At the end of her talk, Suely offers a 8-step program to help us with this vital task. Editing and mix: Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni

28 JUL 2023 · "Our infrastructure for life was relational not institutional. Our orientation for life was internationalist. We shared space and time with plant and animal nations." In this new episode of AMBIENT THOUGHT, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson leads us on a journey to experience the concept of resurgence through encounters with Mindemoya, Siguan and Nanabush and a sweet tale from the time of biidaaban. Editing and mix: Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni

20 APR 2021 · In this talk, drawing on examples ranging from pig farming practices in Denmark to Henry Ford's doomed Brazilian rubber plantation venture, Fordlandia, anthropologist Anna Tsing - author of "The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins" - argues for a need to apply a range of feminist approaches to recount and address the planetary disaster of what has become known as the "Anthropocene". Such approaches are necessary, she says, to get beneath the oversimplifying universalist pretensions of this recently established discursive field regarding the effects of "mankind" on earth. They can also show how these claims to universalism arise from a predominantly white male property-owning class, and how they both mask and are at the root of a still-ongoing history of human violence and environmental destruction, marked by the predations of plantation, industrial and finance capitalism on entangled multispecies lifeworlds. Editing and mix: Graeme Thomson

22 FEB 2021 · In this slightly abridged version of a lecture given at the European Graduate School, philosopher Giorgio Agamben takes up and expands upon Deleuze's formulation of the work of art as "an act of resistance", relating it to his own theories of potentiality, disactivation and the inoperant. Returning once again to his singular reading of Aristotle and referring to the work and worklessness of Titian, Glenn Gould, Franz Kafka and Kazimir Malevich, Agamben considers exactly what type of 'resistance' is at stake in any artistic endeavour worthy of the name. Editing and mix: Graeme Thomson

14 FEB 2021 · The first episode of Ambient Thought features an extract from a lecture given by artist and filmmaker Trin T. Minh-ha, “Between Dog and Wolf”. Through this "colour", entre chien et loup, she evokes the migrant self, boundaries and multiplicities, as well as the complex passage between feelings of identity and alterity experienced by those who struggle under the labels of exile, migrant or refugee. A reimagining of what it means to say, to stay and to move between here, there and elsewhere, in a new unfolding of the poetics of journeys... Editing and mix - Graeme Thomson