Interview with artist Daniela Medina Poch
Daniela Medina Poch (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher from Bogotá based in Berlin. Medina Poch investigates how unofficial histories and interspecies entanglements contribute to the conception of ecocentric narratives, epistemic bridges that amplify non-hegemonic knowledge systems. She works with the political potential of language and language subversion, and sensitive wonderings that are woven into sculpture / installation-performances, lecture-performances and symbiotic listening spaces, artistic pedagogies and collective platforms. She has co-initiated the platforms Embodied Climate Agency, Contextual Research and Babel Media Art.
planetary
One of the key areas of focus for the Swamps and Stars series, is the question of listening and its relation to the more-than-human. Could you say something about this – how does this feature in your own practice and research?
daniela
Listening is a very relevant tool when conceiving eco-centric narratives. We listen polyphonically, binaurally, from a wide range of angles, layers of identities, manifestations of life, and interrelations. Sometimes inner listening is connected to a wider ecosystem. Perhaps the planet imagines through us. ‘Untamed,listening’* enables this threshold: to listen within a situated context while also listening within an extended context, to listen to and through and to become listening channels through which other beings and elements can listen – to align the body with the landscape and become multidirectional pluri~sonic channels. Listening beyond cannons, preconceptions, and hierarchies allows us to radically re-conceive the relationship between animate and inanimate beings and to understand ourselves as part of a broader, non-solely human, context.
*Untamed listening is the term that I described in the first edition of The Listening Biennial.
planetary
In the workshop you presented at our first event of the Swamps and Stars project, you invited us into a space of unknowing, which was also about surrendering ourselves to emergent discoveries. What is unknowing for you – what is its importance do you feel?
daniela
When I theorize about something or think with and about something, it is with the intention of taking into account its infinity, which I will never fully understand or master, but can only try to approach. I like to think of theses and theories as lenses that make complexity visible, thinking with something not as enclosing it in a container, but rather being contained by it: thinking with something as witnessing its multilayered prisms or as Astrida Neimas would say ‘it’s constant process of emergence’*.
Un-knowing can allow a porous attunement to our environments by unveiling plenty of inner and outer worlds and their often overlooked interrelations. In this way, it can allow a wider listening and contribute to de-canonizing hegemonic knowledge systems.
*Neimas, Astrida: Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology.
planetary
For the first event of the Swamps and Stars project, we wanted to explore the Tiefwerder Wiesen, a natural marsh or swamp in the West of Berlin. Bringing attention to the swamp was a way of exploring its particular ecology, which is rich in biodiversity; swamps are also hybrid ecologies, supporting a more “amphibian” approach to life. How did you respond to the site in planning and presenting your workshop? And has the experience opened up new directions for you?
daniela
‘In Tiefwerder Wiesen, the Spree River meets and merges with the Havel, one of Germany’s main river arteries. This fluid encounter is surrounded by a rich meadow, a floodplain that, through alternating high and low water levels, is a constantly evolving landscape – a hybrid environment. This inhalation and exhalation is part of an organic retention area that hosts a continuous exchange of rivers with one another and with the elements and beings that interdependently coexist within the environment.
The ambiguity of this swampy terrain, which is both solid and liquid at the same time, defies static categorizations. The permanent malleability of the Tiefwerder Wiesen terrain offers us the possibility to relate to it from a caring and listening posture, relearning how to move within it at every step.
Yes, the experience allowed me to generate an affective relationship with the Tiefwerder Wiesen that I treasure. The experience triggered a particular relationship to the environment and its beings as a vessel and platform to relate to the un-known through embodied experience and beyond theory.
planetary listening 