Corona Under the Ocean: The colonial conditions of Western knowledge - a podcast by Art Institute HGK FHNW in Basel and TBA21–Academy

The eighth episode, with professor and anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli, begins with her idea of axioms of existence, which put in crisis the abstract and universalist condition of Western philosophy. The ocean is not far from Western epistemologies and ontologies. In fact, it is totally entangled in them thanks to their intimate—and strategically invisible—relationship with colonial history and violence. The notion of geontopower, coined by Povinelli, critically revises the Foucauldian notion of biopower. The fictional but real frontier between life and non-life is a political frontier in continuous expansion, even beyond Earth. This podcast is the result of a conversation between Elizabeth Povinelli and Sonia Fernández Pan, in which the coronavirus was also present along with the idea of the virus as a rhetorical figure.

Further episodes of Phenomenal Ocean


Further podcasts by Art Institute HGK FHNW in Basel and TBA21–Academy

Website of Art Institute HGK FHNW in Basel and TBA21–Academy