Instigator of the first subcultural punk and LGBT movements in the former Yugoslavia, Marina Gržinić (b. Ljubljana, 1958) is the author of more than a dozen critical theory books as well as an artist with an extensive career in collaboration with Aina Šmid.
Gržinić explores the different ways in which neoliberalism uses human death to fuel processes of commercialisation and surplus value. From Abu Ghraib to Lampedusa by way of the history of African culture and the dissolution of the former socialist block, she assembles a political vocabulary that seeks to unravel the effects of global aesthetics on people, drawing attention to the rise and normalisation of what she calls ‘trophy-images’: images rooted in the colonial legacy that display confinement, humiliation, and gratuitous brutality on racialised subjects.
In this podcast, Marina Gržinić talks about amnesia, aphasia, and seizure, about biopower and necropolitics, about borders and volumes, corpus and corpses, about deathscapes, intestines, and holograms, and about the disturbing miniaturisation of affect and empathy, as a process that runs parallel to technological acceleration.
Photo Valerij Ledenev
Related content
