The Spiral Times | BB & Stella Meris

Stella Meris is a painter and multimedia artist from Basel, Switzerland who is active in the Palestine Solidarity Movement in Basel and Berlin. This Spiral is an audio journey which takes as its centre live recordings I made at a ‘happening’ they created in January 2024, which brought curious people across several generations into a pyschedelically colourful painted tent to eat, sit, talk, commune and participate in a conversation about Palestinian liberation, led by people who are the most affected by the current reality. In person, without phones, without judgement. The audience ask bold questions and get bold answers. There is curiosity and laughter. Stella’s happenings are risky experiments in a climate of extreme hostility, but also generate both magical politics and political magic, friction and tension and rupture and repair. As a witness filled me with wonder at the bright possibilities of another future, to solidarity-based approaches to community building, questions of collective resistance and care, and stand as a model for spaces of vision and learning without fear. How do we move now? When Now is the only time we have? Stella joins us in the studio to discuss the ideas behind the happenings and insisting on art as political education in a climate of extreme hostility. We discuss cults, collectivity, and consistent politics of liberation means to them as an artist with familial ties to German Nazism and the little known about pre-zionist German colonial settlement in Palestine. We’ll also blast some tunes!!