On the Loss of Energy.
Radiogram from the Remnants of Collisions.
2023 (Approx Duration: 1 hr 30 mins)
At Work
RED FOREST is a research constellation activated by Oleksiy Radynski, David Muñoz-Alcántara, Diana McCarty and Mijke van der Drift. The name emerged during a research visit to the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Station in spring 2021. The reaction of the forest to Chornobyl’s eco-disaster turned green trees red and the living to not-dead. Mindful of the response of the environment at a variety of scales, including the atomic, Red Forest alludes to this entanglement and resilience, reminding us of the responsibility to face the layers of life in our surroundings, whatever the circumstances. The constellation of Red Forest is not confined to a single discipline, but their work spans media theory, philosophy, anti-colonial praxis, queer theory, feminism, and contemporary critical theory, and their shared practices comprise architecture, radio, film, and performance. Red Forest work contributes to advancing the collective growth of eco-social dignity, recovery of insurgent-indigenous bonds and trans-futurisms.
Red Forest convokes the radiation of resistance after the resistance to radiation.
On the Loss of Energy - Radiogram from the Remnants of Collisions presents a critical fabulation of poetic listening fragments of ongoing Red Forest’s research on Energetic Materialism and ‘Energy-Matters in the context of war’. A long term study, index and analysis to ongoing neo-extractivism, datafication, and fossil fascism interrelated as operations of energy-driven wars vis-à-vis bodies-territories and geographies in resistance.
Sound Staging
On the Loss of Energy continues Red Forest’s investigation into how infrastructural operations are key to contemporary forms of hybrid warfare. By speculating on energy matters in the context of war, this research (in)filtrates a contestation of fossil fascism, environmental racism, and financial colonialism. In the same movement, the work presents an investigation into new foundations for ethics in times of transformation, which stages bleak hopes.
The Radiogram is Red Forest’s sonic and poetic compositional method of electromagnetic transmissions that links documentary research, speculative history, musical improvisation, and science fiction. The sound piece is streamed online, but it also connects to specific sites of access on the biennial route.
In a Farockian transmission of resistance to extractivist mechanisms of mattering — from waves to atoms, to forms of life and war — the Radiogram summons fragmented connections and exchanges between disparate sites of struggle. It traverses and interweaves orders of reality across geographies: trenches that collapse under atomistic interruptions, logistics that are disfiguring natures, political orders and life worlds.
Tuning in, the remnants of collisions oscillating between atomic and astronomic scales are almost audible in a poetic composition of non-linear frequencies and time-travelling tales. Sonifying reverberations of nuclear terrorism in the Russian capture of Chornobyl; echoing Indigenous resistance to ecocidal and genocidal megaprojects in the Mexican Transisthmian Corridor; trans bodies auto-fictioning and modes of community accountability; and whispering militant ghosts and ghost-spells, are haunted by an underlying pulse of (voided) realities that need to be replaced by wiser ways of world-making. Wisdom emitting from forms of struggle that outdistance the sovereign space of the political.
The rage of indignation, protest, break, revolt, rebellion, revolution, and insurgency moving oceans and body-territories energizes these waves. This work is informed by their participating journalistic efforts in The Reckoning Project in Ukraine and Caravana El Sur Resiste in South-Southeast Mexico.On the Loss of Energy. Radiogram from the remnants of collisions is commissioned by the Helsinki Art Museum for the 2023 Helsinki Biennial.
Growing Ensemble
Zwide Ndwandwe – Bass
Sergio Castrillón – Cello
David Muñoz-Alcántara – Synthesizer
Mahal Pita – Electronic instruments and digital composing
The Weather Orchestra – generative algorithmic sound processing
Lyuba Knorozok
Mijke van der Drift
Diana McCarty
David Muñoz-Alcántara
Rabih Beaini
Nika Zenova
Mahal Pita
David Muñoz-Alcántara
Medios Libres
Asher Gamedze is a cultural worker based in Cape Town, South Africa, involved in music, education and history. As an independent musician, Gamedze plays across and between multiple traditions of music including free improvisation, soul music, rock ‘n roll, and many locally situated traditions from Southern Africa. He has performed extensively in South Africa and other parts of the African continent including Egypt, Lesotho and Malawi. Gamedze has been on multiple European tours and has also played in the USA, particularly in Chicago. Gamedze’s debut record as a bandleader, ‘Dialectic Soul’, was released to critical acclaim in 2020. The record received a rating of 8.0 from Pitchfork, was ranked in the New York Times’ Top Ten Jazz Albums of the Year and won ‘Best Traditional Jazz Album’ at the Mzantsi Jazz Awards. His second release, ‘Out Side Work’, consisting of two improvised duets with saxophone players Alan Bishop and Xristian Espinoza, came out in April 2022. He toured that record with reedman Xristian Espinoza in Europe in September 2022 and, in November 2022, toured ‘Dialectic Soul’, playing venues and festivals such as Jazzfest Berlin, Le Guess Who? and Flagey. He has recently also played on the following albums: Luh’ra’s ‘Nice’ (2022), Xhanti Nokwali’s ‘Umthombo’ (2022), On Our Own Clock’s ‘On Our Own Clock’ (2021), Manny Walters’ ‘Dark Halo’ (2019) and ‘Live at Milestone’ (2021), and Angel Bat Dawid and Tha Brothahood’s ‘Live!’ (2020) amongst many others. He has performed live with Ben LaMar Gay, Nduduzo Makhathini, Salim Washington, Alabaster DePlume, and many others.
Diana McCarty is an Independent media producer and feminist media activist, and founding editor of reboot.fm, the award winning free artists’ radio in Berlin. She is a co-founder of the radio networks, radia.fm and 24/3 FM Berlin; of the FACES (faces-I) online community for women; and of the elsehere association. In 2020, she co-curated Latitude on Air—Unsettling Power Relations, the Goethe Institut radio festival that was broadcast in Berlin. She co-initiated the exhibition Nervous Systems: Quantified Life and the Social Question, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2016, Berlin. McCarty actively collaborates with the experimental media project Luta ca caba inda. As a cyberpunk in the 1990s, she was active in independent internet culture with net-art, nettime, the MetaForum Conference Series, and different hacking spaces. Her work revolves around art, gender, politics, radical feminism, technology, and media. McCarty is a proud Chicana from Albuquerque. McCarty taught at universities in Germany and Europe, including the Intermedia Department at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Budapest, the Kunsthochschule Köln, the UDK Berlin and the Kunsthochschule Copenhagen; and is Professor of Film and Video at Merz Academy. She lives and works in Berlin.
David Muñoz-Alcántara’s work intersects art, architecture, philosophy, and research. They focus on producing and reproducing revolutionary poetics of art grounded in liberation struggles and insurgent indigenous pluri-comunalisms. They seek to forward the understanding of art as class-struggle in the imagination and aesthetic praxis grounded in peoples’ liberation merged in socio-ecological collective contructions of autonomy. They combine art, social sciences, history, and philosophy bringing forward strategies of experimental pedagogies, study, and translation as processes of transformative politics. David Muñoz-Alcántara is an award-winning Doctor of Arts from Aalto University and Architect from UNAM-México; was a research fellow 2019-2020 at BAK-Basis voor Actuele Kunst; and 2016-2017 visiting researcher at Goldsmiths University of London. In 2021, Co-founded the Nomad Agency/Archive of Emergent Studies (2011-on); member of Another Roadmap for Art and Education Network (2012-on); curator for the International Biennial-Residency VeiculoSUR (2019-2021); and contributor of Rab-Rab Press.
Jay Bernard (FRSL, FRSA) is an interdisciplinary writer and artist from London whose work is rooted in social histories. Jay was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2020 and winner of the 2017 Ted Hughes Award for their first collection Surge. Recent work includes Blue Now, a live rendition of Derek Jarman’s film ‘Blue’; Joint, a poetic-play about the history of joint enterprise; Crystals of this Social Substance, a sound installation about young people, capitalism and money at the Serpentine pavilion; and Complicity, a pamphlet about colonial memory in the urban environment, based on the collection at the Tate. Jay is a DAAD literature fellow and a fellow at the Institute of Ideas and Imagination Paris.
Lizzie Malcolm (alongside Daniel Powers), founded the Graphic and Interaction Design studio Rectangle and is now based in Glasgow, Scotland. The studio has a focus on interfaces – writing software, building tools, creating archives, and exploring technologies.
Mahal Pita Producer and musician based in Brazil. Their work deals with the transformation of urban cultures via technology and the contemporary influences of global communities, interweaving sacral and profane areas. In 2015, they directed the musical spectacle Looping: Overdub Bahia, Bahia and a corresponding platform, which researches sounds and dance performances of street festivals. Mahal is the music producer and a performer in the multidisciplinary project Baianasystem, combining Bahia guitar sounds with Jamaican sound systems.
Mijke van der Drift, PhD. is a philosopher and educator who works on ethics as a focal point in multi-disciplinary research about social transformation and the philosophy of movement. Van der Drift is a Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London. In collaboration with Nat Raha, van der Drift is co-writing Trans Femme Futures, forthcoming with Pluto Press. In addition Mijke is writing the monograph Multilogical Ethics: dynamics of transformation. Mijke gives talks internationally on philosophy, theory, and gender, and has taught in many art institutions in the UK and abroad. Their writing has appeared in academic and non-academic outlets, such as the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Darkmatter, and Cambridge University Press.
Oleksiy Radynski is a filmmaker based in Kyiv, Ukraine. He was born in 1984 and raised on the ruins of a Documentary Film Studio in Kyiv. After studying film theory at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, he took part in several film education experiments including Home Workspace Program (Ashkal Alwan, Beirut) and Labor in a Single Shot by Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann. His films have been screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Krakow IFF, DovAviv, Sheffield Doc Fest, Docudays IFF, DOK Leipzig, Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), e-flux (New York), S A V V Y Contemporary (Berlin), International Studio & Curatorial Program (New York) etc. As an essayist, he contributed to a number of publications including Proxy Politics: Power and Subversion in a Networked Age (Archive Books, 2017), Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and East Europe: A Critical Anthology (MoMA, 2018), and e-flux journal. In 2008, he co-founded Visual Culture Research Center, an initiative for art, knowledge and politics. He was a 2019-2020 BAK Fellow at basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht.
Rabih Beaini Ra.H aka Morphosis has been crafting away in the nether-regions of the techno underworld since the 90s. Initially as a DJ, a move to Italy in 1996 proved the catalyst to start experimenting in the studio. And he really did experiment: few people craft the sort of emotional, imaginative techno as has Beaini for labels like Sistrum Recordings (Detroit), M>O>S (Amsterdam) and Styrax (Berlin). Whilst his productions join the dots between raw, elementary electronica and jazz, for the last six years his label Morphine Records has released an equally avant guard selection of techno from the likes of Madteo, Hieroglyphic Being and Anthony "Shake" Shakir. Back in Venice, Italy, Beaini opened the Elefante Rosso Music Club which became renowned for its huge line-ups and events, workshops and recordings before it eventually closed to become an education centre. The club had an unwavering musical vision and pursued it, under Beaini’s guidance, with the help of international DJ appearances from the likes of Ame, Prosumer, Donato Dozzy, Patrice Scott and many more. Rabih is founder of the club and live experimental cosmic jazz band, Upperground Orchestra.
Sergio Castrillon is a multidisciplinary Sonic-based Artist-Researcher and educator. Sergio creates performs in a wide range of setups; from solo acoustic instruments, chamber music, and pieces for symphony orchestra and symphonic band; to electroacoustic-mixed music, acousmatic music, music theatre, and sonic performance. Involving processes of improvisation, instant composition, indeterminacy, and comprovisation; exploring different kinds of scoring and notation. His work has been premiered and performed in different scopes and venues all over the globe. Sergio’s research focused on timbral phenomena, instrumental modification, improvisation, reassessing soundscape composition, the encounter of traditional and contemporary sonic worlds, experimentalism in music and sound, and cello performance. All these topics have been approached and explored through collaborations between art and science. Currently, Sergio works as a Lecturer at the Global Music department at the Sibelius Academy (Helsinki University of the Arts).
Zwide Ndwandwe is a bassist from Cape Town, South Africa. Ndwandwe is a full time session musician who’s collaborated with a range of musicians and groups. He is one of the founding members of Kujenga, a seven piece piece instrumental collective based in Cape Town. Ndwandwe is also a writter whose works have been featured in diverse publications including Africa Is a Country and Amandla.
The title is a tribute to June Jordan’s poem.
Read the poem here
Text Fragment at 60”33 from: Ana-Maurine Lara ‘There is Another Way’ in: The Revolution Starts at Home: confronting violence within activist communities. Edited by Ching-In Chen, Jai Dulani, & Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. AK Press 2011/2016