Spatial Delight

Visual Delight

March 31, 2023 Season 1
Spatial Delight
Visual Delight
Show Notes Transcript

Some of our listeners – especially the lucky ones who got hold of our postcards – have asked us about the beautiful illustration accompanying Spatial Delight. What exactly does the colourful image depict? How does it connect to Doreen Massey’s work? And, last but not least, who made it?

This bonus episode features a conversation between host Adèle Martin and Bose Sarmiento, the artist who designed the illustrations for Spatial Delight. Bose discusses the main themes and symbols in her work, and how they connect to Massey’s work, revealing the process behind her aesthetic choices.

Episode Credits

Host: Adèle Martin
Guest: Bose Sarmiento
Writer: Adèle Martin
Producer: Agata Lisiak
Senior Editor: Susan Stone 
Sound Producer: Adèle Martin
Music: Studio R
Artwork: Bose Sarmiento

In partnership with: The Sociological Review Foundation
Funded by: Volkswagen Foundation

Find more about Spatial Delight at The Sociological Review.

Episode Resources

Doreen Massey’s work quoted or mentioned in this episode:

Further resources:

Adèle Martin  0:03 
Hello and welcome to Spatial Delight, a podcast about the politics of space. I'm Adèle Martin and I will host today's bonus episode about the artwork for the Spatial Delight podcast made by Bose Sarmiento.

Bose Sarmiento  0:18 
Hi, my name is Bose. I am originally from Mexico City, but I have been living in Berlin and other places for the last five years. I have a background in arts -- be it visual, plastic arts and more performance arts -- but I also have a background in women's rights. I studied in Berlin and I am now currently in the city doing a few different freelance works.

Adèle Martin  0:47 
Doreen Massey spent a great deal of time in Mexico City. In 1999, she made a documentary about it for the BBC; we'll link to it in the episode notes.

Adèle Martin  0:58 
Bose Sarmiento's illustration depicts a panoramic view of Mexico City from the sky. It is composed of four sections. There is a dense arrangement of buildings in the centre; the nature on the right and left corner made of plants, mountains and volcanoes; a colourful sky at the top; and an overview of the pre-Hispanic city and its temples surrounded by water at the bottom. Although the background of the picture is made of a collage of different coloured pastels, each section has a dominant colour. The urban city is mainly black, the nature mainly green and brown, and the old city deep purple, whereas the sky is made of a patchwork of mainly delightful vibrant colours.

Bose Sarmiento  1:42 
There's colours under these colours, and we cannot see them under, but it's what gives it texture. It's similar to oil painting: it's layer after layer after layer. And that has a sense of the palimpsest, of overflowing information, of also how space is built. What you see are very big newspaper sheets that I painted on certain palettes of blues, of purples, of greens, of browns, of blacks, then I cut it into tiny pieces, put together and then mixed all of them. So all of them interact with each other, which is part of actually my choice for representing social relations, they all have a little bit of each other.

Bose Sarmiento  2:24 
What I am interested in are stories. That's my focus in life, from different perspectives: if it's told through theatre, through music, through sound, through colours -- I absorb them, and that also applies for my political work, for understanding the stories of people in a world context. That's how I am pulled towards it. That's also what I'm thinking about when I do translation. I work a lot in translation, so I try to honour people's stories. And geography is just one other form of telling people's stories, honouring how complex it is.

Adèle Martin  3:08 
Doreen Massey insisted on thinking about space always in relation to time. Bose Sarmiento talks about how time is a main theme in her illustration.

Bose Sarmiento  3:17 
Mexico City is built on top of Tenōchtitlan. It was not finished (the city) before colonisation, so it never looked like it was supposed to look like, but there is this one painting in the Anthropology Museum that I visited, where you could see how it should have looked like, which was stunning. Because Mexico City is on top of a lake, and it's these pyramids that take an infinite amount of time to build and are surrounded by water, connected by water. That's the city that is under Mexico City and that's -- that's its past. And then this deity, Coyolxāuhqui, is actually the figure that is on the bottom left of the illustration. In 1978, when an electricity company was doing work in the centre of Mexico City, they found this huge monument that was under the ground. It's a stone -- carved -- of this goddess, but it was literally found under the temples -- the Catholic temples -- that are now in the centre. So it was figuratively and literally remnants of the city that once was under Mexico City. And they unearthed it and now it's exhibited.

Adèle Martin  4:30 
Bose Sarmiento describes in which ways the concept of porosity is echoed in her artwork.

Bose Sarmiento  4:39 
The background -- it's volcanoes, it's horizon and mountainy scape -- is important to me because it's part of the city. If you look around from anywhere, you will see volcanoes because Mexico City is at the top of a mountain, kind of just like a huge one, but also because I wanted to keep that idea of porosity, stones and plants kind of like a symbol of the terms that Massey used. The city is permeated by us, by the cultures that arrive permeate the city and they even stay lodged in or I am permeated by Mexico City sounds, its flavours and its music, but also by the cities that I've lived in and the people that I have shared space with. Porosity just made it feel like we're all open to receive information as people and as cities, we receive information that stays lodged in.

Adèle Martin  5:44 
This was a conversation with artist and activist Bose Sarmiento who's created the illustrations for Spatial Delight. If you'd like to learn more about the things we discussed, go to the podcast page on thesociologicalreview.org. Thank you for listening.