The German Pavillon at the 23rd Triennale Milano International Exhibition
Nomadic Cosmologies and Fugitive Power

Artist, architect, and researcher David Muñoz-Alcántara’s inquiry deals with nomadism of thought and aesthetic praxis at the intersection of futurity and actuality. His recent work looks at militant poetics and radical critique through arts grounded in liberation struggles against class, gender, and racial enclosures. In practice, he produces contextually grounded installations often involving collective study, drawing, writing, and translation as spaces of politics. He has a DA in Contemporary Art Practice from Aalto University, Espoo; MA in Applied Art and Design at the University of Helsinki, Helsinki; and a license in Architecture from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City. He is Founder of the research studio NÆS-Nomad Agency/Archive of Emergent Studies (2011–ongoing), which claims the political space of research, and is a member of the editorial committee of Rab-Rab Press. He was a 2019-2020 BAK Fellow at basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht and a KONE Research Fellow in 2021. Muñoz-Alcántara lives and works in Helsinki.

Feminist media activist Diana McCarty is a 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. She co-initiated the Latitude on Air Radio Festival in 2020. As a cyberpunk in the 1990s, she was active in independent internet culture with net,art, nettime, the MetaForum Conference Series and different hackingspaces. Her work revolves around art, gender, politics, technology, media and radical feminism. She was a 2019-2020 BAK Fellow at basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht and a KONE Research Fellow in 2021. She is a Professor of Film and Video (with Filipa César) at the Merz Akademie. McCarty is a proud Chicana from Albuquerque. She lives and works in Berlin.

Philosopher, performer and educator Mijke van der Drift works on ethics as a focal point in a multi-disciplinary research about social transformation. Van der Drift is a Research Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London. Previously Mijke worked as theory lead at the MA Non-Linear Narrative at the Royal College of Art, The Hague. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, with Cambridge University Press, Routledge and many other outlets. She was a 2019-2020 BAK Fellow at basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht and a KONE Research Fellow in 2021. Van der Drift lives and works in London.

Oleksiy Radynski is a filmmaker and writer based in Kyiv. His award-winning short films have been screened at film festivals including DOK Leipzig, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Docudays IFF, Artdocfest, Odesa IFF, Watch Docs, Molodist IFF, as well as at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), e-flux (New York), SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), International Studio & Curatorial Program (New York) and others. After graduating from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, he studied at the Home Workspace Program (Ashkal Alwan, Beirut). His texts have been published in 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), Being Together Precedes Being (Archive Books, 2019) and in e-flux journal. He gave talks and presentations at Berlinale Forum Expanded, Museum of Modern Art (New York), Shtab (Bishkek), Stroom Den Haag, and Architectural Association (London). He is a participant of VCRC, an initiative for art, knowledge, and politics founded in Kyiv, 2008. He was a 2019-2020 BAK Fellow at basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht and a KONE Research Fellow in 2021. In 2020, he convened War and Cinema, a cycle of artist films for e-flux Video and Film.

Nomadic Cosmologies and Fugitive Power | Red Forest Radiograms, 2022 | © Goethe-Institut Mailand | Graphic: UAU Studio Red Forest presents the program of the German Pavilion
 

Radiogram #1: Runaway Noosphere | C-Print series, 2022 © Image courtesy of Red Forest Oleksiy Radynski in conversation with Svitlana Matviyenko
Sonic Intervention by Sasha Dolgiy In the interwar period, the Soviet geologist and philosopher Vladimir Vernadsky diagnosed the transformation of the scientific thought into a geological force that affects material processes on a planetary scale and one able to transform the planetary biosphere ‘according to the interests of freely thinking humanity as an organic whole’, and sublate it into the Noosphere - a highly networked sphere of unified human knowledge. Vernadsky claimed that the transition to the Noosphere went utterly unnoticed and unreflected by humanity itself, which led to devastating consequences in the form of two world wars. He passed away just before the Hiroshima bombing, a challenge to his cautious optimism regarding the Noosphere’s future. With cyberwar, this future has arrived and its shifting battlefield is now in Ukraine where the nexus of cyber and nuclear emerged as the symptomatic trace of the runaway Noosphere.

Svitlana Matviyenko is an Assistant Professor of Critical Media Analysis in the School of Communication and Associate Director of the Digital Democracies Institute, Vancouver. Her research and teaching are focused on information and cyberwar, political economy of information, media and environment, and infrastructure studies.

Sasha Dolgiy is an artist, musician and innovator. In 2012-2018, he was an organiser of ЭFIR, a legendary artist run space in Kyiv. His work has been represented at a number of venues in Ukraine and internationally, including documenta 14.
 

Radiogram #2: Transformative Poetics | C-Print series, 2022 © Image courtesy of Red Forest Mijke van der Drift in conversation with Jay Bernard, Thomas Nail and Sebastian De Line, Sonic Intervention by Femi Oriogun-Williams
 

Pressures of war, disease, and extraction are changing the world. Lucretius’ poem from 1st Century BC combines such recognisably contemporary faultlines with a philosophy of transformation and shifting social relations. In Lucretius philosophy, matter makes new forms and these new forms are Nature generating itself. The world is an interplay of transformations. Lucretius’ Nature invites us to hold space for the potentiality of flourishing, rather than delimit  change through extraction. Ways of worlding are made, but not only by ‘managing humans’ but through all the mattering processes that turn potentialities into actuality - as these are forms of care.

Jay Bernard is a writer and artist from London whose practice is rooted in documentary, archives and social history. 
 
Thomas Nail is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver and author of numerous books, including The Figure of the Migrant, Theory of the Border, Marx in Motion, Theory of the Image, Theory of the Object, Theory of the Earth, Lucretius I, II, III, Returning to Revolution and Being and Motion. His research focuses on the philosophy of movement.

Sebastian De Line is an artist, Associate Curator, Care and Relations at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, and PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. Publications include the Journal of Visual Culture, Junctures, and Journal of Critical Race Inquiry.
 
Femi Oriogun-Williams is a writer, musician and radio producer. His work has been broadcast on national Radio in the UK and he has made podcasts and sound installations for various institutions such as Somerset House, Serpentine Gallery, Bergen Kunsthall and Rough Guides.
 

Radiogram #3: Enchanted Technologies of Transmission | C-Print series, 2022 © Image courtesy of Red Forest Diana McCarty in conversation with Anna Bromely, Tetsuo Kogawa & Alla Mitrofanova with Sonic Intervention by JD Zazie

 


Radio is not only a media-form but also a phenomenon of radiation. Let us think of radio as an emitting action/process where receiving is part of transmitting. An action of radio transmission-reception would be a kind of self-oscillation and the relationship between this action and the audience would be a resonance that enchants our various emotions and moves our bodies. The point of transmission between technology and nature is our body that might temporarily provide an enchanting process where technology, art and our existence resonate together.

Anna Bromley is an artist, radio producer, and writer that got her start in the DDR. Her installations, re-enactments, and sonic projects have been recently commissioned by international festivals such as the documenta14, and the Manifesta 14, and beuys2021| beuysradio. She conducts research and teaches on dissident and clandestine radio practices,and their herstory(s) from below. https://www.annabromley.com/

Tetsuo Kogawa in his 80 years of life, teaching, directing and free-radio activisim turned out to be a joke. He is now more concentrating himself on "transmission" practice from "radio without contents" to radiation-art and even to writing as "écriture transmission". https://radioart.jp

Alla Mitrofanova is a feminist critic and philosopher working with media art and new ontologies. She writes and lectures on contemporary philosophy, the theory of feminism, art, science and performance. Mitrofanova lives and works in St. Petersburg. 

JD Zazie (aka Valeria Merlini) is an experimental DJ, avant-turntablist, sound artist and curator from Bolzano based in Berlin. Coming from a DJ and a radiophonic background JD Zazie has explored different approaches to real-time manipulation of fixed recorded sound. In her work she redefines DJ and electroacoustic activities. https://jdzazie.tumblr.com

 

Radiogram #4: The Nord Stream Mindset | Red Forest for Goethe-Institut Mailand/Graphic UAU Studio David Muñoz Alcántara & Diana McCarty in conversation with Gilberto López y Rivas, Nataanii Means, Omar Jabary Salamanca, with a sonic intervention by Alexandra Cárdenas
 

Despite massive controversy, the construction of the Russian-German natural gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 has been completed, but its certification process has been halted due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Yet the project remains a real and imagined spectre haunting Germany and other countries in the European Union as their desire for (Russian) fossil fuel supplies and commercial investments directly contradicts their desires for environmental and geopolitical security. The devil is in the detail.

Gilberto López y Rivas, is a Professor and Researcher at the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Morelos, México. Gilberto served as director of the National School of Anthropology and History in Mexico; Senior Researcher at the Ludwing Bostman Institute in Austria; Professor at the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico; and Professor at the Univesity of Minnesota in the U.S. He was an Advisor to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), during the Roundtables on Indigenous Rights and Culture, Democracy and Justice and an Advisor to the Government of Nicaragua on Indigenous Issues and Autonomy from 1981 to 1990.

Nataanii Means is an Oglala Sioux, Omaha and Navajo actor, hip-hop artist. He is the son of prominent American Indian activist Russell Means. He supported  #NoDAPL movement on the front lines. Nataanii is known for Cowboy Up (2001), Frybread Face and Me and Drunktown’s Finest (2014) and Hip-Hop.

Omar Jabary Salamanca is an FNRS Research Fellow and coordinator of the Observatory of the Arab and Muslim Worlds (OMAM) at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). His research and teaching focus on critical geography, settler colonial studies, political economy and political theory. He is currently completing a manuscript on the contested politics of infrastructure in Palestine to be published by Verso Books.

Alexandra Cárdenas is a composer, programmer, improviser, and live coder, born in Bogota and based in Berlin. Her independent research on live coding and decoloniality engages with ancestral knowledge, the sublime, randomness, Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning, embodiment, cyberfeminisms, privacy, and freedom in digital media.
 

Radiogram #5: Sonic Rites of Healing & Abundance | Red Forest for the Goethe-Institut Mailand/Graphic UAU Studio With Satch Hoyt and the voices of those we don't always name but never forget
 

Your voice is inseparable from your being, your history, your future and is the bridge between your inner and outer worlds. When there is a rift between what you express and how you actually feel, the truest part of you is abandoned. When you free your most authentic and natural voice, it is an act of self love, and essentially you are validating and freeing yourself.
You come back into wholeness and integrity with yourself, planting the seeds for true freedom, happiness and joy to bloom.

Satch Hoyt, born in London of British and African-Jamaican ancestry, is currently living and working in Berlin. He makes sculptures and installations accompanied with sound, as well as paintings and drawings. There is a dichotomy in the genres that define two sides of the same coin: a dual and complementary reflection on the African Diaspora and its multi-fold consequences. The sculptural trope in Hoyt’s work addresses the facts on the ground, so to speak, of black experience, while the drawings tap into a spirit of fantasy, refuge, and transcendence - they are vehicles for an imaginative journey beyond the obduracy and oppressiveness of history.

Radiogram #6: Nomadic Cosmologies & Fugitive Power LiveJam | Red Forest for Goethe-Institut Mailand/Graphic UAU Studio With Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Bino Byansi, Filipa César, Muhammed Lamin Jadama, Aino Korvensyrjä & Moro Yapha, Sonic Interventions with Ghazi Barakat and Paula Montecinos Oliva, Hosted by David Muñoz Alcántara & Diana McCarty of Red Forest. Technical Production Noémie Cayron. Realized at Wearebornfree! Empowerment Radio Studio.

This live experiential discussion was streamed on Radio reboot.fm.
Here the Podcast.

Part 1
  Part 2
 
Weaving the topics of Weaponized Infrastructures or Extractivism and the Lilypad with We will not be the wall, we will not be the ship! Cultures of deportation, border regimes and forced displacements together, this is a call for reflection on how these issues interrelate and collide with how people can live.

Extractivism can be understood as the result of a one-directional attention to environments. Capitalist conceptions of economic growth encoded in technologies of engagement, i.e. financialization and datafication impose a brutal rhythm on the organic composition of energy by turning it into a speculative value measured in its propensity to extraction. Energy Infrastructures become engines for a contemporary system of colonialism imposed by the theatricality of war. These dynamics are further linked to anthropocentric and western philosophical conceptions of how life should be lived, which is at heart of contemporary alienation. To contest the ongoing climate catastrophe, the recontextualization and recovery of the social specificity of energy production is crucial. Not all lilypads are beautiful.

Freedom of movement and dignified dwelling, as the rights of nature and humans are to be defended for the necessary sustainability and health of an ecosystem. Movement as care for life is life’s heartbeat in flux. In the contemporary world the border has been turned into an epistemic framework in the service of a global hegemony, and the regulation of movement as a modern strategy of war. Contemporary globalization, led by capitalist transformations thriving  market instrumentalization of democracy, has pushed forward the crisis of humanism and of ecology. One of its mechanisms has been the proliferation of borders.

 

Radiogram #8: Poetics of Liberation. A call for nourishing pluralistic ways of being | Red Forest for Goethe-Institut Mailand/Graphic UAU Studio With Sezgin Boynik, Alberto Torres, Giovanna Esposito Yussif and Sónia Vaz Borges, Sonic Intervention with DJ Zhao
 
This final sonic and experiential conversation navigates the myriad topics raised over the course of Nomadic Cosmologies and Fugitive Power, weaving climate struggles with environmental justice and transformative futures. This closing is also an opening and an invitation to engage with the socio-ecological dimension of energy and people’s resistance against the epistemic injustice that is present in extractivism, datafication and a narrative that claims it cannot be otherwise. It is also a call to celebrate and defend the many forms of life that need space to flourish on their own terms. To mobilize with the overcrossing rebellious rhythms and the ancestrality of resistance.

Sezgin Boynik, lives and works in Helsinki, having completed his PhD on the Cultural Politics of Black Wave in Yugoslavia from 1963 to 1972 at Jyväskylä University’s Social Science department. He has been published on numerous topics, including punk, the relation between aesthetics and politics, cultural nationalism, Situationist International and Yugoslav cinema. He is editor of Rab-Rab: Journal for Political and Formal Inquiries in Art (www.rabrab.fi).

Alberto Torres is a Doctoral candidate and Master in Latin American Studies-UNAM. He is currently Lecturer in Latin American Studies in the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, UNAM. His research focuses on the indigenous in guerrilla groups of the 60s and 70s in Latin America, encounters and missed-encounters of resistances and rebellions towards the exercise of common knowledge.

Giovanna Esposito Yussif engages with curatorial praxis and research. Her background is in art history, museology, and critical theory. Giovanna has a long-standing commitment to non-dominant praxes, dissentient imaginations, and epistemologies in resistance. In 2019 she curated the Pavilion of Finland at the 58th Venice Biennale with the Miracle Workers Collective. She is currently artistic director of Museum of Impossible Forms (MIF), co-artistic director of Drifts Festival, curator for M_itä biennale 2023, and co-curator for Helsinki Biennale 2023 with MIF.

Sónia Vaz Borges is a militant interdisciplinary historian and long-time social and political organizer. Her publications in German, Portuguese and English, include the essays Na pó di Spera: Die koloniale Peripherie Lissabons, In Decolonize the City. Zur Kolonialität der Stadt – Gespräche (Unrast); On Space of imaginations and the space of memories: Remembering Conakry PAIGC headquarters (The Funambulist), and the book Na Pó Di Spéra. Percursos nos Bairros da Estrada Militar, de Santa Filomena e da Encosta Nascente (Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian). Her recent book Militant Education, liberation struggle and consciousness. The PAIGC education in Guinea Bissau 1963-1978 (Peter Lang) focuses on liberation schools and the concept and praxis developed by the PAIGC.

DJ Zhao brings contemporary and classic dance music together from all five continents, with focus on Africa. While his DJ sets reach from culture centers to remote areas of the globe, and from now back through the ages, DJ Zhao’s remix and mashup work directly connects "East" and "West", acoustic and electronic, traditional and hyper-modern.
 

This podcast consists of an immersive, sound rich collage of voices collected and recorded in person at the Triennale Milano. People express their opinion about the Triennale in general, commenting on specific exhibits as well as on the overall theme of this edition, and also express their opinion about the German Pavilion, describing in detail what it looks like and how it can be experiences by visitors.
Production and Sound Design by Cristina Marras.

An immersive, sound rich interview with Radio Raheem co-founder Marco Aimo in which he first outlines Radio Raheem’s philosophy and approach towards art, sound, society and politics, and then explains the involvement of the radio with Triennale Milano, and specifically the collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Mailand and Red Forest group for the German Pavilion.
Production and Sound Design by Cristina Marras.

 

In this interview Red Forest’s Mijke van der Drift, David Muñoz-Alcántara and Diana McCarty explain the genesis of their “Nomadic Cosmologies and Fugitive Power” at the German Pavilion of the 23rd Triennale Milano. Their work consists of a series of radiograms long about 2 hours each, their role is to engage the listeners asking them to talk back to the problems in their own environment. They also acknowledge the absence of the fourth member of red Forest, Oleksiy Radynski, who is away but contributing to put together more body of knowledge.
Production and Sound Design of this interview by Cristina Marras.

Andrea Lissoni, artistic director at Haus der Kunst in Munich, talks about his visit of the German Pavilion at the Triennale 2022, focusing on the role of experimental art and new art practice. Role of experimental media in art, new art practices with digital media, how Triennale 2022 deals with contemporary issues with an unprecedented approach, challenging makers to go beyond a simple description but forcing them to produce meaning. Description and analysis of German pavilion, problems of contemporary society, radio as political media, importance and courage of German Pavilion.
Production and Sound Design by Cristina Marras.

Researchers Daria di Bello, Charlotte Koch and Ségolène Bulot describe the Italian-French-German project Women’s Voices in Palermo, part of the residency program of Kultur Ensemble Palermo and highlight the commonalities with the work created by Red Forest for the German Pavilion: use of podcast, working as a collective and challenging the Eurocentric perspective.
The three researchers observe cultural practices and scales of values ​​of migrant women living in the Sicilian capital. Why the project has been conceived as a podcast, how the city of Palermo is perfectly suited to the project, both as a hotspot for people of different cultures and backgrounds as well as a good example of society open to a no-border perspective.
Production and Sound Design by Cristina Marras.