Son[i]a #305
Anton Kats
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.
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 (b. 1983, Kherson, Ukraine), “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. Anton Kats is pure process, discipline, energy, and empathy.
Ambiguity and transition inform every step of Anton Kats’s practice. From his lived experience, which includes a rushed migration (and subsequent assimilation) – from post-Soviet Ukraine to the euphoric, Europe without borders of the 2000s – and experiences in high academia – with a practice-based doctorate at Goldsmiths – before landing in the liminal spaces between the contemporary art gallery, informal education, festivals, and club culture, where he now intermittently dwells.
His vices and virtues include handling, mixing, and confronting the vocabularies of academia and everyday life, while trying to strike a delicate balance between the pragmatic, political, and aesthetic, with his antenna always tuned to the privileges and possible agencies that open up in the artistic arena and all the possible complexities that may (or may not) arise from there. Practice shapes his research, and his projects are produced in spaces and in close collaboration with specific people and groups, including names like Hiwa K and the Chicago Boys, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Nabil Ahmed, Janna Graham from the Centre for Possible Studies, and more recently, Maia Urstad and Eva Rowson… to mention just a few.
Radio, which is embedded in his background through his grandfather, who was a field radio operator in the WWII, also plays a prominent role in his artistic practice, as a mobile, open, mutant, informal device. In his hands, radio is a user-friendly tool which he uses to reclaim and occupy public space while connecting formal social structures with the streets – from Tate Modern, Documenta, Sonic Acts, Lighthouse or Bergen Kunsthall to grassroots art and education spaces such as Studio 174 in Kingston, Jamaica. His narrowcasts provide a listening space for voices, needs, urgencies and non-conformist narratives.
In this podcast we opt for extensive, durational listening, enthralled by Anton Kats’s verbiage, charisma, and intuitions. We talk about the Europe of integration through his embodied experience, 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, about needs and voices outside of the mainstream, and about fictions, meta-reality, and re-enactments of historical events that never happened.
Reni Hofmüller
In the 1990s, twenty minutes was all it took for local authorities in the Austrian city of Graz to detect and neutralise any illegal radio transmitter. Back then, Reni Hofmüller was part of a group of activists who took over the airwaves with pirate broadcasts every Sunday from the mountains surrounding the city. After short 18-minute sessions, the Radio Dauerwelle team would pack up its equipment and clear out, moments before the authorities arrived. In this podcast, Hofmüller shares her early commitment with radio, as well as her obsession with dismantling the invisible in order to understand and question it. A trip through time that takes us from the 1980s to the present, through her personal involvement in feminist discussions from the perspective of new media. Our conversation is riddled with references to her commitment to open source, to doing things together, to the uninhibited mixing of disciplines, and to her passion for the electromagnetic sphere and bicycles.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Reni Hofmüller that we were unable to include the first time around.
Deleted scenes
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.
Janna Graham
Janna Graham talks about critical and radical pedagogy, about the educational turn, and about how pedagogical practices interact with cultural practices and social struggles. She discusses her experiences at different institutions, reflecting on the risk of the museification of activism in the midst of the neoliberal mélange, and talks about "parasitic" processes in the redistribution of cultural resources into social justice projects, and about the challenge of actively integrating the voices and demands of the marginalised groups that the museum works with.
Nora Sternfeld
Nora Sternfeld problematises the educational turn and talks about the crisis of the museum model, radical pedagogy, emancipatory practices and alliances, para-institutions, unlearning strategies and collective knowledge projected into the future.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Irit Rogoff that we were unable to include the first time around.
Irit Rogoff
Irit Rogoff talks about ways of creating participatory, creative, and cognitive alliances that allow us to critically inhabit contemporaneity. She also calls for the need to devise processes of unlearning, inside and outside the academy, that will pave the way to new and unexpected kinds of knowledge.
Deleted scenes
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.
Short Waves / Long Distance
This show, curated by Wave Farm, presents an international look at works that explore the sonics of the shortwave radio spectrum (2-30 mHz), and the experience of long distance listening. It features works by Patrick Harrop, Ed Osborn, Javier Suarez Quiros, Mark Vernon, William Basinski, Nicholas Knouf, Edward Ruchalski, Sally Ann Mcintyre, Stephen Bradley, Pietro Bonanno, Linda Dusman & Alan Wonneberger, Jeff Gburek, Jed Miner, Amanda Dawn Christie and Lee Rosevere.
Deleted scenes
Hank Bull takes the idea of boredom as a springboard to fire off some interesting ideas about entertainment and archives.