Listen back to the broadcast on Movement Radio. – Anastasia Diavasti of NTIZEZA [Instagram] and Sumugan Sivanesan of fugitive radio planned to research around a common interest in Cassie Thornton’s book The Hologram (2020) and their different approaches to (performative) radio. Spurred on by a timely meeting with Cassie when she was laid over in Athens in March, the duo set about working intuitively. They made recordings at the recent student occupations at Olympia Theatre [Instagram] and Rex Theatre [Instagram], visited the Vio.Me workers co-op in Thessaloniki and primed themselves for telepathy.
For Onassis AiR Open Day #6 they will host a live broadcast to play out their recordings and interviews, and reflect on the themes that emerge with invited guests. These include: dance, solidarity, SF, teargas and cats. It will combine spaces at Onassis AiR, Athens, with spaces at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht.
A conversation with Toronto-based radio artist Andrew O’Connor [Instagram] and Todd Lanier Lester one of the founders of Lanchonete.org, an urban research and artist project based around a neighbourhood lunch counter in Conjunto Santos Dumont in central São Paulo.
Late in September 2022, Andrew installed a site-specific radio artwork in the laneway of Conjunto Santos Dumont, featuring a series of interviews he conducted with residents in collaboration with architect, urbanist and interpreter Gabi Ushida.
On the first weekend of October we collaborated on “Rádio Santos Dumont” a day of workshops, events and performances. We were joined by Merien Rodrigues of Itinero Grapho [Instagram] who hosts workshops in a mobile printmaking studio that unpacks from her Kombi van. Also on board was journalist Amber Cortes and illustrator Carl Nelson who had both traveled from the US to be in Brazil during the presidential elections (2 October). Local musicians Gabriel Edé [Instagram] and Vitor Wutzki [Instagram] contributed a very successful songwriting workshop. Carol Godefroid [Instagram] and Gabriel Carnelós [Instagram] provided live translations and photo-documentation, and their voices feature in this episode alongside those of Francisco Josepha de Castro AKA Chico and Nadija.
Woven through this episode are excerpts from Andrew O’Connor’s radio installation and edits of a recording of São Paulo-based musician Felinto [Bandcamp] whose performance closed the first day of the event.
Special mention must go to the people of Conjunto Santos Dumont who welcomed us: notably Liduina whose fruit shop was a base for our activities and Tarcisio, whose bar is the base for Lanchonete.org.
fugitive radio rádio em fuga in Brazil 2022 is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts.
An email sent to some partners on this project in April, that seems worth revisiting as I prepare the first podcast that marks the beginning of ‘Fugitive Radio’ (it could be that Barraca do Sound System becomes one aspect of Fugitive Radio…let’s see how things pan out).
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I’m now in Berlin, and the conversations I’ve had with people here in the time of Corona often acknowledge just how privileged we are. After checking the stats and listening to the popular Coronacast with Christian Drosten with my housemates (and keeping an appropriate distance), I spent some time yesterday exchanging messages with friends around the world. I’m self-quarantining and I noticed Berliners seem pretty at ease with it. Maybe it’s the weather? The last couple of days have been superb. After dealing with my health care paperwork and applying for some emergency funds, I had an exchange with some friends in Bangladesh. A Channel 4 news report circulating on Facebook discussed a leaked government document that projected up to 2 million COVID-related deaths there. It mentioned poor but vibrant neighbourhoods that I visited when I was in Dhaka in February, and where friends are running long-term community-focused projects. A dear friend, A, an artist, activist and journalist, told me the city has been evacuated. Many of the businesses are closed, but not all, and some people are forced to keep working. His office is closed but he continues to work long hours from his apartment because people rely on the news. Him and K, another friend in the chat, were both alarmed by the Channel 4 segment, and we scheduled a conference call later in the week. I checked in with a Bangladeshi friend in Berlin and asked her how I could support and she replied that she is simply collecting money and donating regularly to organisations there that she trusts.
Later in the evening a friend in Colombia checked in on me. C wanted to know if I’d arrived in Berlin OK. She was visiting family when the pandemic hit. The state went into total lockdown, even citizens were not allowed back in. C and her family were at that time visiting relatives in Mexico and had to rush back. All seventeen of them were forced to stay in a small apartment where they could register on arrival. Police perform regular check-ups so they have to remain there. She said it was better to do so, because when people get scared and anxious the violence also escalates. Last night she messaged to say she had moved to another apartment that was free for a fortnight. Her brother drove her across town but she had to hide in the back of the car because they would otherwise be pulled over. In Bogotá the lockdown laws are strict. Other than accessing medical services, people were only allowed out to shop for groceries, to walk a dog or for short bursts of exercise. Furthermore, the days you are allowed out are determined by your ID card number. This had proven to difficult to manage, and the mayor recently announced that this process would be from now on determined by gender: females on one day, males on another, couples on a third. Obviously, this significantly affects gender non-conforming people, who were already the target of police harassment and violence. C said aside from those working in essential services, people with press passes were also relatively mobile. Many of them were now organising food drops and running errands. C brother’s drug dealer is also a bus driver and thus an essential worker. He could get you anything and then would deliver it to your door in uniform.
I fell asleep thinking of other friends around the world with whom I’ve been checking in lately; folks in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Pakistan, Brazil, Spain and Australia. All of them in lockdown and often trying to get to places with better infrastructure or facilities, or isolating away from urban centres. My mind kept re-working that well worn cliché: ‘the pandemic is everywhere, it’s just not evenly distributed.’ Before waking I dreamed about ‘Kimberly Crenshaw’ — not theKimberlé Crenshaw — but the host of a popular Canadian talkshow, ‘The Crenshaw Connection’. Friends were sharing her live webcast on social media. I’d never watched her program or even knew what she looked like. Her partner had suddenly died in the last 24 hours from the Coronavirus. He was not a celebrity and he was Black. She was broadcasting her breakdown live and people were sharing it as a kind of collective grieving.
I woke up and wrote down what I could recall and began to think about a live radio project that would connect and collect these different experiences of the virus. I made a list of people I know, making connection across much of Europe, Asia, Latin America and Australia.
Today is the first day of a year-long artist-research project Barraca do Sound System and I want to mark the day with a clearing gesture. Given the current climate of anti-Blackness I want to begin by acknowledging my debt to Black culture, Black ingenuity and Black resistance. As a project that proposes to investigate and develop anti-racist media activism (initially in Europe), it makes particular reference to Afro-Brazilian practices and innovations.
The above Instagram post is from Daddypus Rex AKA Lee Richards, a multidisciplinary artist/poet/stand-up comedian and yoga teacher here in Berlin, which they published after the Black Lives Matters rallies following the lynching of George Floyd. Listen to Lee and Camille Barton speak about decolonial practices of healing, connection and pleasure during the Coronavirus pandemic.
Anti-racism can seem too general a term as differently racialised, and thus privileged people, confront anti-Blackness in their own families, communities and indeed in their own thoughts and perceptions. As the curator and scholar Kathy-Ann Tan recently demanded on Facebook:
non-Black People of Color need to step up and stand together with Black people to decry anti-Black violence!!! That means you, Asians in the diaspora — you who know only too well, and have internalized, the reductive and infantalizing cultural stereotype of the model minority.
This is a time for radical love, empowerment and care, for the force of anger and the erotic as power. It’s a time for re-connection to those who came and fought before us, because they believed in justice and deeply understood what solidarity meant at all costs. Because they knew that no one is free until Black people are free, no one is safe until Black trans people are safe.
Tan posted an image sourced from Howard L. Bingham’s Black Panthers (1968) to emphasise a history of solidarity and revive a slogan that remains appropriate today: ‘Yellow Peril Supports Black Power’.
Howard L Bingham, 1968
With Barraca do Sound System I would like to extend an ongoing process of Black, indigenous and people-of-colour (BIPoC) solidarity that I’ve been fortunate to be a part of with the Berlin-based climate justice collective Black Earth. Even in the context of white supremacy, BIPoC solidarity cannot be presumed. I understand it to be a careful process that unfolds in ways that are particular to the communities, places and spaces in which it occurs. Barraca do Sound System proposes to develop such spaces, platforms and infrastructures where such solidarity can develop, online and ‘in real life’.
Barraca do Sound System is a practice-based research project, investigating the overlap of migrant media activism and urban music culture. It combines practice-based ‘DJ-as-method’ media experimentation with urban research and academic scholarship. The project is funded by the Kone Foundation Finland and is being developed in collaboration with Pixelache, a transdisciplinary platform for emerging art, design, research and activism based in Helsinki.
This episode presents a chronological sweep of field recordings and interviews taken in Madrid during COP25, December 2019, by our guest host Dr. Sumugan Sivanesan. It begins with the December 6 Manifestacíon in which around 500,000 people marched in the streets of Madrid, before tracing discussions at the Social Summit for the Climate (Cumbre Social por el Clima) at Complutense University and at other actions around the city.
Featuring the voices of: Asad Rehman, Executive Director of War on Want;
Vanessa Nakate, Founder of the Rise Up Movement; Nicole Figueiredo de Oliveira, Director of 350.org in Brazil and Latin America; Marta Bordons Martínez, Climate activist, Fridays for Future Sevilla; Moñeka de Oro, member of the Micronesia Climate Alliance; Nigel Henri Robinson, Denesuline organizer, radio host, and humorist from Cold Lake First Nations, Indigenous Climate Action; Chief Dana Tiyza-Tramm, Vuntut Gwitchen First Nation.
Sound Swarm #5, a radiophonic protest sound performance and choreography organised for the 6 December Manifestacíon in Madrid coinciding with the UN climate conference COP25 by Grey Filastine, a verteran activist and musician. Sound Swarm was first produced by Filastine and the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination for a bike bloc at COP15, Copenhagen 2009.
Bi’Bak is a kino, event space and archive focused to Turkish culture in Berlin, and more broadly migrant experiences.
Can Sungu presents ‘Please Rewind’ at Bi’Bak Kino
On Thursday 28 November 2019 Can Sungu delivered a talk and screening on Turkish film and video culture in Berlin. It emerged in the 1960s with Gast workers bringing in film reels to Munich. Here they would book out kinos at odd times, eg 9.30 am, and play to full houses of recent immigrants. Soon kinos popped up in major cities such as Stuttgart, Hamburg and Berlin, catering to the Turkish community. The culture expanded dramatically and in the 1980s with the advent of video. Films were also made in Berlin employing a range of tropes and stereotypes to describe the migrant experience and it’s relationship to the ‘homeland’. Video saw the demise of the Kinos, and a video piracy market also developed alongside regular rentals. A dubbing industry for Bollywood films and Danish porn also developed to serve the migrant market!
Today I met up with Moro Yapha one of the producers of We Are Born Free Empowerment Radio, an activist radio founded by refugees broadcasting live out of Kreuzberg on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays between 13.00–16.00.
Moro told me the radio which launched in 2015 in a Projektspace made available to them from the inhabitants of Waldemarstraße 46., following the Oplatz Occupation nearby (October 2012–April 2014).
The media activist radio took part in Kotti FM, which ran 24-hours-per-day over September 2016.
Alongside Moro, from Gambia, the station is run by Muhammed Lamin Jadama, also from Gambia, and Bino Byansi Byakuleka from Uganda. Located in a supportive Keiz, the radio station/media centre connects directly with the neighbourhood, with a street front door and locals reguarly dropping by during broadcast hours. The projektraum also hosts meetings and workshops. With the cramped studio housed in a small windowless room around the back, Moro tells me it is a space that nevertheless inspires self-confidence and is a safe space for his brothers and sisters. It is place they can some to hang out, cook food and socialise, not like a ‘proper’ radio studio where they would be allocated a timeslot after which they would have to leave.
The station which broadcasts in Berlin via Reboot FM also has a significant audience in Africa, who most often listen in via Facebook. It also connects to students at Humbolt University and their partners in the US. Moro also tells me they have collaborated with a number of organisations to produce remote broadcast events including SAVVY Contemporary, YAAM, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Africa Avenir and have also run workshops for refugee youth housed at the former Templehof airport.
Alongside refugee issues, the radio also advocates for range of minority rights including gender, race and ablism.
willful acts of unruliness
agents of knowledge resisting knowledge objects
scale autonomy
decoupling publics from the state
a game of tinkering with the parameters of the given
emerges from a compulsion to participate and the fatigue to respond
a question of publics
tied to the social production of value
as parametric politics
A poem of sorts cribbed from an essay by Clemens Apprich and Ned Rossiter ‘Sovereign media, critical infrastructures and political subjectivity’ (2016).
Concerned with the shadow libraries such as Library Genesis and aaaarg.fail that collect and serve to distribute texts (and thus knowledge) beyond academic and economic constraints, Apprich and Rossiter discuss ideas about subjectivities that arise when developing sovereign media networks and autonomous critical infrastructure:
How, then, to conceive a political imagination designed not around a reconstitution of the liberal subject inherent in appeals to the public, but rather a subjectivity that emerges from the collective production of infrastructure and knowledge that is underlined by an anticipatory politics in a world gone to ruin? … How, in other words, to think of sociality beyond the state yet immanent to digital infrastructures of communication and knowledge production? (p. 277)
They go on to cite the example of Brazil in the early 2000s in which the Ministry of Culture sponsored media activists to develop digital inclusion and literacy in the country. Apprich and Rossiter claim this temporary coalition between the state and activists changed the ‘face’ of media activism from white middle-class producers to ‘more diverse and eclectic grassroots groups, which included hip-hop crews, Indymedia hackers, popular culture producers, as well as activists from black and indigenous movements’ (pp 278-279). Giving for example the media network MetaReciclagem as a name anyone can adopt, which interests me as a collective entity or identity.
In their discussion of such politics of shadow libraries and recycled technologies they claim ‘template cultures have become today’s iron cage of reason’ as they advocate for sovereign media’s potential of restoring the ‘’90s net-cultural promise of producing your own media as the material basis of collective organization, yet have to do so in a post-Snowden environment of secrecy.’
Apprich, C & Rossiter, N 2016, ‘Sovereign media, critical infrastructures and political subjectivity’, in R Bishop, K Gansing, J Parikka & E Wilk (eds), Across & beyond: a transmediale reader on post-digital practices, concepts and institutions, Sternberg Press, Berlin, pp. 270-83.
A scene from a short film created as part of the 2016 Technoshamanism festival video workshop.
From an interview conducted by Beatriz Garcia, publisher of the Spanish Laudano Magazine, with Fabiane M. Borges, Carsten Agger, Ariane Stolfi and Raisa Inocêncio, participants of the technoshamanism network. English translation by Carsten Agger, Ariane Stolfi, Isabella Aurora and Iaci Kupalua.
We can give a Brazilian point of view that doesn’t represent the history of all the people involved in this network. Since the network is diverse and alter-globalist, each person has their own vision of how they became a part of it. But from a Brazilian perspective we could start with the World Social Forums in Porto Alegre since 2001, where there were already practices that related ‘do it yourself’ culture with traditional cultures and permaculture, where lots of people from free software and DIY networks had met. We could also situate as a specific point the Media Tática Brasil Festival (MTB, “Tactical Media Brazil”), which happened in 2003 in Casa das Rosas, organized by activist groups working with free software and urban art. At that time, the Leftist Party had come to power through the election of president Lula (PT), who nominated Gilberto Gil as Minister of Culture. Gil joined the MTB and expressed interest in taking the project inside the ministry. Very shortly, activist groups were implementing one of the PT government’s biggest Free Software projects, called Cultural Hotspots (pontos de cultura).
Through the implementation of this program, hundreds of hackers, hacktivists and open-source programmers gained access to a ‘deep Brazil’ consisting of communities and ways of life very different from those of the big cities. The word “technoshamanism” started to appear about that time, as a consequence of the meeting of the implementers with traditional Afro-Brazilian, indigenous and riverside communities. The sensation arose that the Free Software movement was not only about technological inclusion but also a meeting point for different cultures, perspectives, knowledges and technologies. It was at this point that the word “technoshamanism” started to show up in the networks, with a number of connotations, some of them more technophobic and other more technophile, but the essence was a re-enchantment with the native cultures, with shamanism, with magic and with the idea that the technologic production was very far from its immanent potential and from the connection with Planet Earth. So in 2014, when the majority of the implementers of the program had already left their government jobs, we decided to make the I International festival of Technoshamanism, following a tradition of festivals that used to relate free software with alternatives or traditionals ways of life as Digitophagy, Submediology, Metarecycling, Tropixel, Technomagic, Satelliteless movement, etc.
The first Festival of Technoshamanism was organized in Arraial d’Ajuda, in the Itapeco Institute of Permaculture, with collaboration of the Bailux lab (an offshoot of the Meteracycling network) the Hacker Bus, Voodoohop, LCCP – laboratory of body-creation-performance-interference, the Pataxó from nearby Aldeia Velha and lots of other contributors. At that festival, it was more clearly defined what technoshamanism is about: 1) Plant
Technology, agroforests, permaculture, water springs, seed banks etc; 2) Production of communities, coexistence, exchange of knowledge and free technology, relations between different communities; 3) Free software, open source, do it yourself culture; 4) Art, subjectivity and electronic technologies: rituals, aesthetic production, music, cinema, videos, performances, imaginary and fictional construction, medicinal plants, teas, baths, all at the same time and now.
After the I Festival several meetings happened, in many of them other partnerships were made, with people from networks like Cryptorave, Chaos Magic, Climatic Caravan, Hacker Bus, Hacker Camping, Baobáxia, etc.
The current stage is to decentralize technoshamanism from Brazil, so the III International Festival will be held near Aarhus (Denmark) under the care of Carsten Agger in July or August of 2019.
willful acts of unruliness