PODCAST

Postcritical Psychogeographies. From Weak Resistance to Weak Avant-Garde.



This podcast is based on the premise that comparisons are useful, however should also be limited and conducted with caution. It also reclaims transdisciplinary approach as one that can allow grasping the formation and evolution of such phenomena as resistance and avant-garde. The aesthetic experience, understood as one conducted by the senses, in a cultural context, is the most general premise of theories, social movements, art projects and other things discussed here.

This is the podcast Postcritical Psychogeographies. From Weak Resistance to Weak Avant-Garde, hosted by Ewa Majewska, with the generous technical support of Sergio Frutos, sponsored by the grant of the Minister of Culture in Poland (2025). This podcast was inspired by Agata Lisiak’s Spatial Delight.


PILOT
Introduction to Postcritical Psychogeographies
Ewa Majewska

20.03.25
08:45




Why would I want to move between the weak resistance and weak avant-garde? Because I think that an act of weak resistance, a disagreement with the canon, always takes place before a weak avant-garde event, project or agency appears.
I called this podcast Postcritical Psychogeographies because I like the situationists and lettrists, you could say that I grew up reading them and about them, and doing psychogeography with my friends in Warsaw. I also grew up with the critical tradition, and my use of ‘postcritical’ is a way to expand, not stop, that current’s legacy.

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EPISODE 1
Introducing the concept of weak avant-garde
Ewa Partum versus the neo-avant-garde practice
Ewa Majewska

10.06.25
36:15




In this episode we discuss the concept of weak avant-garde in relation to the artwork of Ewa Partum, her three performances from the early 1980. In these artworks the artist challenged her own position as recognized artist, and invited stupidity, idioticism, naivete as her allies. Theories of Boris Groys and Jack Halberstam are referenced, and the discussion goes direction neo-avant-garde - showing that Partum's artwork, just as many post-1960 art project by women, people of ethnic and sexual minorities, as well as groups, do not fit in the ‘neo-avant-garde’, as defined by Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloch, but nevertheless can be seen as avant-garde practices.

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EPISODE 2
Planetarity
What it has to do with weak avant-garde?
Joanna Warsza, Tim Waterman, Ewa Majewska

20.07.25
32:08




I decided to discuss with thinkers and curators working on planetarity, because I believe in large scale thinking and I also believe most of us stumble over the scale of today’s most engaging phenomena, such as the climate crisis, rise of border regimes, neoliberal globalization and return of fundamentalism. I thus thought that speaking with those, who try to embrace the large scale will give us a sense of the large perspective for discussions on weaknesses, criticality and psychogeographic practice.

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EPISODE 3
Avant-garde and against it
With Antje Majewski
Antje Majewski, Ewa Majewska

10.08.25
15:45




Antje Majewski is a painter with a research-based, conceptual and collaborative practice that includes other media. Her work looks at nature/culture entanglements of human beings, objects, territories, and plants. She deals with the question of the representation, narration and transformation of reality. Majewski is a professor of Fine Art and Painting at Braunschweig University of Art. Projects organized by Antje Majewski have been shown at M_HKA, Antwerp, Kunstmuseum Thun, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Museum of Art in Łódź, Kunsthaus Graz, HKW Berlin and others. She lives and works in Berlin and Himmelpfort.

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EPISODE 4
Resistance, scale, planetarity
With Patricia Reed
Patricia Reed, Ewa Majewska

16.08.25
39:25




Patricia Reed is a feminist artist and theorist, since 2019 she has been the Masters Tutor at the Design Academy Eindhoven (NL) in the Critical Inquiry Lab. She co-authored the Xenofeminist Manifesto (Verso, 2018), as part of Laboria Cubonix, and recently published the book Cosmovisiones de otro mundo: Reimaginando el pensamiento planetario, trans. Federico Fdez. Giordano, (Barcelona: Holobionte Ediciones, 2025). She lives and works in Berlin. More: https://aestheticmanagement.com/biography/

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EPISODE 5
About the canon - feminist strategies
Marina Abramović versus Martha Rosler
Ewa Majewska

21.08.25
32:08




This Episode is dedicated to the amazing feminist artist and a great Friend, Martha Rosler, and I need to express my sincere apologies for waiting more than 10 years with the realization of my idea - first to compare Rosler and Abramovich, and then also to discuss the Meta Monumental Garage Sale, shown at the NY's MoMA in 2012. In this podcast I offer some initial points and analysis, basically leading to the conclusion that the performative, critical, political and artistic value of Martha Rosler's intervention at the NY MoMA in 2012 consisted in spectacularly failing.

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EPISODE 6
Podcast as care
With Agata Lisiak
Agata Lisiak, Ewa Majewska

23.08.25
27:16




Our conversation with Agata Lisiak concerning feminism, theory, urban and critical studies has been ongoing since more than a decade. This is why it is so complicated to just make a short interview with her. The research she has conducted concerning the feminist critical geographer, Doreen Massey and the Polish-Jewish-German communist economist, Rosa Luxemburg, became a topic of her inspiring podcast, the Spatial Delight, available on the website of the journal Sociological Review.

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EPISODE 7
Between queer aesthetics and queer justice
Conversation with dr Antke Engel
Antke Antek Engel, Ewa Majewska

25.08.25
31:07




The many conversations we engage in together with Antke Antek Engel, always are inspired. They think totally out of the box, it is like as if feminist, queer, poststructural and critical theories were reshuffled anew, every single time. Their concepts of queerversity and the queerverse begun as a critical take on the much flattened notion of diversity, in many ways appropriated by neoliberal academia and culture to offer a superficial vision of embodied difference.

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EPISODE 8
Avant-garde and the counterpublics
With Stevphen Shukaitis
Stevphen Shukaitis, Ewa Majewska

27.08.25
29:27




Stevphen Shukaitis teaches at the University of Essex. He grew up in Pennsylvania, where he became involved in the independent music scene, organizing music and arts events and working in independent radio and music production. For over twenty years, Shukaitis has been active in autonomous and independent publishing.

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EPISODE 9
Avant-garde as gendered value production
With prof. Angela Dimitrakaki
Angela Dimitrakaki, Ewa Majewska

28.08.25
34:47




Angela Dimitrakaki is Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Edinburgh. She was the Program Director of the MSc in Modern and Contemporary Art: History, Curating and Criticism until July 2025, and is currently on a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to research the metaphorical uses of ‘family’ in art and photography from the postwar period to the 21st century.

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EPISODE 10
Avant-garde in Eastern European art and sound experiments
With Māra Traumane
Māra Traumane, Ewa Majewska

04.09.25
25:52




Māra Traumane is an art historian and curator, researcher at the Art Academy of Latvia in Riga. Her research focuses on artistic practices in Eastern Europe after WWII. Currently, she is working on her doctoral thesis dedicated to the artists’ group Workshop for the Restoration of Unfelt Feelings (1982-1989).

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