Radio Echo

Coming thick and fast, this is the fifth episode of Radio Echo with fanfare, this time with Daniel Seemayer talking about PUB, an interdisciplinary initiative led by students at the Sandberg Instituut: comprising artists, writers, editors and designers who aim to structure and establish a publishing practice at the Instituut. We’re in a bit of a jumbled order now since I’ve yet to publish the fourth episode’s second part (which will come out in advance of the next /b/channel event at fanfare). This decision is mainly so that this present recording could come out ahead of PUB’s event at fanfare, entitled “One Publishes to Find Comrades”. Considering the discussion that’s about to follow, it’s a very appropriate title, since a lot of what we talked about is publishing’s continued role in establishing communities, a role that seems ever more pertinent in our current media climate.

For the fourth episode of Radio Echo with fanfare, it’s a conversation between European Echo editor Charlie Clemoes, co-founder of fanfare Freja Kir, and artist, designer as well as this year's first participant in fanfare’s /b/channel series, Nolwenn Salaun. The conversation took place a few days after Nolwenn’s performance at fanfare and the recording begins with Freja describing the idea behind the /b/channel format, then proceeding towards a specific discussion of Nolwenn’s own performance for /b/channel. As with the last conversation with the Office for Workspace Studies, I’ve decided to split the episode into two parts, since the second half of our conversation moved on to a more general discussion of fanfare, so stay tuned for that.

Last week the saw the first in a two part discussion with Francois and Mirjam from the Office for Workspace Studies. Now we return for the second part. The conversation begins with me relating a relatively personal dilemma about some of the work I’m doing at the moment, specifically, consultancy, where it’s well paid but a bit sell out, since the thing they’re buying is not just my labour but also my cultural capital. Francois quite graciously points out that the money earned creates the opportunity to do other work that would otherwise have no space in the economic realm, although I’m still rather ambivalent about it. This then provides a foreground to the following discussion, in which we talk about the tendency to choose service work as a second job, this being something which has traditionally required you to give less of your self away, but now in fact increasingly employs people for their cultural capital as well.* Bringing things full circle, this infiltration of cultural capital into service work is something Francois and Mirjam's present concern for the term talent represents quite well. * I make reference to some articles at this point, one in Jacobin by Peter Frase, entitled "In Defence of Soviet Waiters", and another by Paul Myerscough in the London Review of Books, which this first article links to, on the 17 principles for the ideal Pret-a-Manger worker. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/02/soviet-waiters-emotional-labor-customer-service/ https://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n01/paul-myerscough/short-cuts

This is the third instalment Radio Echo with fanfare, this time it;s with Mirjam Reilli and Francois Girard-Meunier of The Office for Workspace Studies, ahead of a presentation of their work at fanfare. As the name suggests, they’re interested in the peculiarities of modern workspaces and especially the language used to describe work in these spaces. As you’ll hear from the very start there was an interesting unspoken aspect to the conversation, inasmuch as we were all conscious that some of the things we were talking about could only be referred to in generalities. Furthermore, I was careful to cut out the bits where we do refer to our workplaces directly. Besides one instance which we figured was fine to keep in, no companies are mentioned. All in all, it makes for an interesting absence. I’ve decided to split this recording into two, since there were quite a lot of interesting subjects touched upon, too many for a single 20 minute episode. In this first part, it’s important to explain, again in non-specific terms, that before the recording began we were talking about one workplace in which all the workers, from those working in the back office and the front of house to the cleaning and catering staff, are referred to as “talents”. This led to an interesting discussion of how much we can speak about our work, the tendency of what David Graeber calls the bullshit job and the difference between valuable work and useful work.

NXS is the product of the collective Goys & Birls, comprised of Juliette and Monika as well as Florian Mecklunburg and the conversation was recorded in advance of the first issue’s release, which is on the subject of Cyber Sensuality. The topic of cybernetics was not something I had considered for a while, but this was a good excuse to spend the week brushing up on things, mainly reading Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and a few bits and pieces by Bruce Stirling. I was also given a few texts to read from the issue, namely those of Raf Rennie, Agnieszka Zimolag, Trudie Barber and Jack Self. When I refer to the issue in the following conversation, it’s these texts that I’m talking about. Spotting keywords such as "ephemerality", "penetration" and "sadomasochism", what struck me most from these texts was their somewhat depressive capitalistic tone, quite understandable given the subject matter, but it reminded me of Mark Fisher’s discussion of Capitalist Realism, an ideological-aesthetic aspect of contemporary corporate capitalism in the West that suggests that capitalism is the natural order of things and that our behaviour should be understood and explained exclusively in accordance with this aspect. Fisher, who sadly died earlier this year, wrote extensively on his blog k-punk, and I would encourage everybody to delve into the blog for more on the idea of capitalist realism, for now this basic idea that we behave in every aspect of our lives according to capitalist ideology, should be seen as the main frame for my questions…

For Echo Radio, this is the first in a series in association with fanfare, the design studio comprising Freja Kir and Lotte van de Hoef, in which I’ll be talking to the people who fanfare are exhibiting and collaborating with in the coming months, in a fairly unstructured and informal conversational format. This time, I’ll be talking to Bojana Panevska, who works at TransArtists (the Information centre for visual artists, artist-run initiatives and cultural institutions) and is editor of the associated magazine Station to Station. Station to Station is a magazine that features research and reflections, in both text and audio, on the art world and art practice. This conversation has been timed in advance of the launch of Station to Station’s second issue at fanfare. In this episode, we mostly hover around conceptions of value, things that go unmentioned in art, whether artists can be independent and the ever obvious question of what even constitutes an artist,

The fifth European Echo podcast picks up the conversation with Domenique Himmelsbach de Vries at the Himmelsbach Research Centre, or to quote its full name the Himmelsbach Research Centre for Off-Grid Existence and Dilettantism. This time we talk a lot about the nature of work, what work pays and what art has to do about it, we finish up talking briefly about Domenique's idea for a gallery for socially-engaged art, an idea we will pick up in future.

The European Echo podcast is back up and running after the festive break. This, the fourth instalment, is the promised second part of my conversation with Xavier Robles de Medina, in anticipation of his solo exhibition “If You Dream of Your Tongue Beware” opening on 22nd January at the Catinca Tabacaru Gallery on the Lower East Side. This time, moving away from a more general conversation, and again, as promised, I manage to talk a little bit more directly about Xavier’s work.