E-flux Podcast

Recorded at e-flux before the launch of Dorit Chrysler’s album, Calder Plays Theremin, on February 23, 2023. The conversation with Sanna Almajedi is followed by an excerpt from Dorit’s live performance. The album Calder Plays Theremin is a co-release by the NY Theremin Society and Fridman Gallery, and can be ordered on Bandcamp. The album is based on a sound piece commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the exhibition Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start. For the piece, Chrysler identified two of Alexander Calder’s sculptures, Snow Flurry, I (1948) and Man-Eater with Pennants (1945), to interact and “play” multiple theremins on site.  Dorit Chrysler is a Berlin-based composer and sound artist, and co-founder of the NY Theremin Society. Her work explores new applications of the theremin in various forms. Chrysler was awarded the Austrian State Stipend in Composition 2023 and earned her Master's Degree of Musicology in Vienna. She has performed worldwide, and written for film and the t

A conversation with artists Hock E Aye VI Edgar Heap of Birds, and Keith Christensen on the occasion of their exhibition and book project, In Union, on view at Open Source Gallery in New York. In Union highlights the native role in a union strike, union families, and environmental protests. The conversation is hosted by Matt Peterson. Read more about the project here. Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds has worked as an artist, activist, and teacher. Heap of Birds's artwork confronts unacknowledged histories of state and settler violence against Native communities in the United States. His piece “Our Red Nations Were Always Green” was published by e-flux Architecture in May 2021. Keith Christensen is an artist and designer. His work includes a focus on social justice issues. He created Game Turn, Learning from the Minneapolis Truckers’ Strike of 1934, a book and board game installation. He recently authored the book See & Say Time on his paintings.  Matt Peterson is an organizer at Woodbine, an experiment

Sanna Almajedi speaks to Maria Chávez on the occasion of Topography of Sound (2007–now) at e-flux. The conversation is followed by an excerpt from the performance, Maria’s first public live show since a medically induced sabbatical.  Maria Chávez is an abstract turntablist, conceptual sound artist, and DJ based in New York and born in Lima, Peru. Coincidence, chance, and failures are themes that are at the heart of her practice, which expands from the world of sound to sculpture and other disciplines. Chávez is one of the only people, if not the only person, in the world that uses the double-headed RAKE turntable needles in her live performances. She uses broken needles that bounce and scratch in their attempt to play a groove. Sometimes she breaks the record itself and stacks broken shards of vinyl on the turntable. Through these experimentations, Chávez utilizes destruction as a method to discover new sonic worlds. Chávez’s influences stem from improvised contemporary music; she is an avid practitioner of

This episode was recorded live during the launch of e-flux journal issue #131 on December 7, 2022. The evening was introduced and moderated by the journal editors, and featured authors Martin Guinard, Sabu Kohso, Matt Peterson, Leon Dische Becker, and Cosmo Bjorkenheim. Martin Guinard expands on his “Homage to Bruno Latour” with a message on diplomacy between different worlds that are no longer commoning together. In connection to Dische Becker and Bjorkenheim's later conversation, Guinard also touches on Latour's (non-)relationship to science fiction.  Sabu Kohso and Matt Peterson discuss their conversation “The Catastrophe Revealed: On Radiation and Revolution,” which traces deep, interconnected fault lines between the ongoing aftermaths of the Fukushima disaster and the Covid pandemic, as well as the imperial and also liberatory history of activist movements in Tokyo, New York, and all places where people rise up against a disintegrating world.  Leon Dische Becker and Cosmo Bjorkenheim discuss their essay 

Lukas Brasiskis, associate curator of e-flux Video & Film, talks to Erika Balsom about the book and exhibition co-curated with Hila Peleg, Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image.  The episode was recorded at e-flux Screening Room before “No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image,” a talk by Erika Balsom preceded by a screening of Han Ok-hee’s Untitled 77A (1977, 6 minutes) and Grupo Chaski’s Miss Universo en el Perú (1982, 32 minutes). Erika Balsom is Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of four books, including After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (Columbia University Press, 2017) and TEN SKIES (Fireflies Press, 2021, shortlisted for the Kraszna Krausz prize). Her criticism appears regularly in venues such as Artforum, Cinema Scope, e-flux, and 4Columns. With Hila Peleg, she is the co-curator of the exhibition No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image (HKW Berlin, 2022) and co-editor of the books F

Sanna Almajedi talks to Jad and Tarek Atoui about their experimental music duo, Through Rust and Dusk. The conversation is followed by an excerpt of their performance at e-flux on September 26, 2022 that incorporated improvisation, custom made instruments, field recordings, and electronic sounds.  Read more about Tarek Atoui‘s The Whisperers (October 1–December 10, 2022) at Flag Art Foundation here.   Jad Atoui is a Beirut-based sound artist and improviser. He composes and performs electronicand electro-acoustic music and has worked with musicians like John Zorn, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Anderson, Chuck Bettis, and Anthony Sahyoun. During his formative years in New York, Atoui found interest in the New York avant-garde scene. He began working closely with NYC downtown musicians and learning improvised music techniques, while also working at the Stone and the Guggenheim Museum. In 2015, Atoui spearheaded the “Biosonics” project in collaboration with scientist Ivan Marazzi where they used bio-sonification of be

Ben Eastham talks with authors Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams about their novel, Diego Garcia (Fitzcarraldo Editions, Semiotext(e) / Native Agents). “Through the intricately woven histories and the corresponding fictions within fictions, the compassion expressed in Diego Garcia highlights the absence of it in those who, forsaking their obligations towards other human beings, exiled the Chagossians from their home. We see that until the Chagossian people are home, nobody is home.” –Vanessa Onwuemezi, author of Dark Neighbourhood About the book: August 2014. Two friends, writers Damaris Caleemootoo and Oliver Pablo Herzberg, arrive in Edinburgh from London, the city that killed Daniel—his brother, her frenemy and loved by them both. Every day is different but the same. Trying to get to the library, they get distracted by bickering—will it rain or not and what should they do about their tanking bitcoin?—in the end failing to write or resist the sadness which follows them as they drift around the city. On

Hallie Ayres talks to Miriam Hillawi Abraham and Nasra Abdullahi about their text, “The Afro-Cosmologist's Treatise on the Astrolabe,” published in the Cosmic Bulletin 2021.  Miriam Hillawi Abraham is a multi-disciplinary designer from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. With a background in Architecture, she works with digital media and spatial design to interrogate themes of equitable futurism and intersectionality. She holds an MFA in Interaction Design from the California College of the Arts and a BArch in Architecture from the Glasgow School of Art. She is a CCA-Mellon researcher for the Digital Now multidisciplinary project, a 2020 fellow of Gray Area’s Zachary Watson Education Fund and a Graham Foundation 2020 grantee. Nasra Abdullahi is a designer, writer, and editor based in London. She is currently a junior writer at Wallpaper* magazine, the 2021 guest editor of The Avery Review and a member of the second cohort of New Architecture Writers. A student at the Bartlett School of Architecture, she is interested in

Andreas Petrossiants discusses We Are “Nature” Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones (Pluto Press/Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, 2021) with authors Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan. An excerpt from the book was published in e-flux journal issue 124.  “Since 2004, through the work of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, we have questioned how to radically transform and entangle art, activism, and everyday life amidst the horrors of the Capitalocene. A decade ago, we deserted our metropolitan London lives, rooting our art activism in a place that French politicians had declared “lost to the republic,” known by those who inhabited it as la ZAD (the “zone to defend”). On these four thousand acres of wetlands, turned into a messy but extraordinary canvas of commoning, an international airport project was defeated through disobedience and occupation. This is an extract from our latest book, where an art of life is populated by rebel farmers and salamanders, barricades and ba

Hallie Ayres talks with Shimrit Lee about her forthcoming book, Decolonize Museums.   Shimrit Lee is a writer, educator, and curator based in Philadelphia. An interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of visual culture, performance, and critical security studies, Shimrit’s research interests relate to the cultural production of security narratives in Israel and the US. She holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from NYU, and currently teaches high school history as well as community-based adult education at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her book, Decolonize Museums, will be published as part of the series “Decolonize That” by Warscapes and O/R Books in 2021.

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects. Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers en

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects. Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers en

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects. Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers en

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects. Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers en

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects. Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers en

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are composed out of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies, defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects. Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of 9 sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists and researchers ena

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are composed out of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies, defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects. Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists on 9 sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists and researchers ena

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are composed out of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies, defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects. Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of 9 sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists and researchers ena

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are composed out of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies, defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects. Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of 9 sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists and researchers ena

Andreas Petrossiants speaks to Woodbine members Matt Peterson and Laura McAdams. Woodbine is a volunteer-run experimental hub in Ridgewood, Queens for developing the practices, skills, and tools needed to build autonomy. Since March 2020 they have run a food pantry in partnership with Hungry Monk that serves thousands of families per week. “We came together out of our experiences in Occupy Wall Street and Hurricane Sandy, after having lived through a New York City forever changed by 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis. Trump and Covid are only the latest in a series of disasters we have had to face together, and community resilience and collective autonomy remain our answer and horizon. In the fall of 2013 Woodbine was conceived as an organizing framework to rethink how to inhabit a city and neighborhood together. Now it is time to begin a new chapter and phase, and expand our collective capacities.” Quote from Woodbine’s website. Support the fundraiser discussed in this episode here.