Anton Kats on MÆKUR (Anton Kats + Eva Rowson + Maia Urstad)
Deleted scenes
This podcast is co-produced by Sonic Acts and part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.
It began as an intuition, a desire. Eva Rowson opened up the Landmark program at Bergen Kunsthall with a stack of questions, from the title of the programme that the activity was part of, “Who’s doing the washing up?” to conundrums with few certainties and many potential answers, in a speculative imagining and mapping of possible futures. In the midst of these, a rather more specific question arose: what happens when you cross two practices that draw on communication technology, artistic research, radio, recording, archive, and processes? What happens if you cross Maia Urstad (Bergen, Norway) with Anton Kats (Kherson, Ukraine)?
Our time machine allows us to answer until 2020 with MÆKUR, which is back again with Eva Rowson after a first stint at Lighthouse (UK) in 2019, and which openly incorporates it into the collaborative processes, because it has always been there. With a methodology focusing on aesthetic experience and the present moment, as well as hospitality and context, access and agency, and stories shared and left untold.
MÆKUR create temporary radio labs and portable sound systems as a way to open up communication technology and enhance its usefulness on a local level. Their work involves sensory research on radio and listening, through dialogue between the ongoing present and a constantly growing mutant archive.
In these outtakes, Anton Kats talks about the transition from MAKU to MÆKUR, about slowing down and opening up listening spaces, and about contextual and emotional infrastructure in art practice.
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We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with curator, artist and cultural producer Eva Rowson that we were unable to include the first time around. Eva expands on her proposition of being nice as an integral part of her curatorial and managing work, while taking into account the challenges of maintaining safe and welcoming spaces. The questions of quotas and infrastructure pop up in the conversation too.
Anton Kats
Process, liminality, mediation, transmission, radio, resonance, orality, archive, and abundance. In our coinciding and crossing of paths with Ukrainian artist, mediator, educator, and musician Anton Kats, “the stars aligned” to put prior learning and formats to the test. Three remote encounters, six hours of recording, and several red-hot scissors have produced this exquisite corpse in which we explore a discourse and practice that tend to spill over and exceed boundaries in both nuance and detail. In this podcast, we talk about the Europe of integration, about memory, dementia, and different ways of not knowing, about artistic research and art that defies representation, about site-specific projects and mobile, ephemeral devices, about narrowcasts and radio as a means of creating common public spaces.
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We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Maia Urstad that we were unable to include the first time around.
Maia Urstad
Norwegian artist Maia Urstad talks about nostalgia, radio pips, AM, FM and DAB, about the importance of ska, about arches and obelisks, sounds in the fjord, and time capsules, about program 81, freq_out, and foghorns, and about local radio stations and lost tapes.
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Hank Bull takes the idea of boredom as a springboard to fire off some interesting ideas about entertainment and archives.