RADIO SLUMBER is a three-part aural brew and online grimoire that casts its gaze out from a closed-door coven of potluck workshops + secret societies + spa retreats + fests of slumber (ᴬᴷᴬ ...pwsssrfs...) that took place at Motel Spatie in Arnhem, Netherlands, over the winter of 2020. This turn to the ‘endotic’ (as in Perec’s spatial and anthropological turn from the ‘exotic’) makes multi-dimensional inversions of the east-west dichotomy, strategically dissecting cultural theorist Rey Chow’s ‘fascist longings in our midst’. From RADIO SLUMBER’s audio book of spells, gossip whispers leak the accidents of intersectionalism and conjure—via the foundation of friendship—other practices of care from both near and far.
One year later, this mixed media brew of herbs and processes have ripened as a ‘diasporadic’ fermentation: deep listening, storytelling, conversation, music and other audio experimentation complete the slow brew for a sound slumber.
The three-part series of broadcasts launches 12-14 February 2021 with three full moon chapters to sound out the lunar new year. Each séance will first premiere on one of RADIO SLUMBER’s collaborating partner stations, to be archived on this website afterwards.
❧ Séance I: Friday, 12 February 2021 at 18:00 UTC+01 on Stranded FM (Utrecht), featuring:
❧ Séance II: Saturday, 13 February 2021 at 18:00 UTC+01 on Radio Orange (Vienna), to be archived here the following moon and featuring:
❧ Séance III: Sunday, 14 February 2021 at 18:00 UTC+01 on Hong Kong Community Radio and Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee (Amsterdam), featuring:
For the full playlist of footnotes, audio herbs and processes, including the time sequence of each séance, please check the “⋯⋯brew⋯⋯” section. RADIO SLUMBER has been gently stirred into being by coven mama-sans 何穎雅 Elaine W. Ho and 吴索 Amy Suo Wu.
Clara Balaguer is a cultural worker and gray literature publisher who operates under collective or individual aliases that intimate her stewardship in any given project, the latest of which is To Be Determined. TBD is a loosely organized structure for leaking access to cultural capital, comprised of sleeper cells and yet-to-be-determined Trojan horse networks that activate-deactivate in response to external factors: abundance to be distributed, urgencies to be addressed, or leisure to be.
Teana Boston-Mammah (born in Freetown, Sierra Leone, moved to England in 1973 and to the Netherlands in 1994) is a sociologist with a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology from Essex University (UK) and a Master degree in Urban Studies and Public Policy from the Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is particularly interested in notions of identity in an urban context. Research areas include inclusive pedagogy, intersectional feminism, inclusion & diversity from a postcolonial perspective.
超生产队 Chao Co-op is: Producing together! (Miao Mothers Temple) Working on twenty roles at the same time. (Elis) Collaboration to upgrade the traditional family. (Kaantata) A pregnant person. (Tina) Everybody is a woman worker! (A-Bao) Mama with three heads and six arms. (Mitsou) To see each other. (SARS) Born from love. (Momoblast) Powered up! (Miao Mother Temple) We are as splendid as rape blossoms in the field! (Chenmin) Renovate and Transform, Diligence and Wisdom Woven Together! (A-Dan) Diversity has sprung from inside the traditional family. (Xin Heng) Because love is work, work is born, lovechildren worlds worlds! (Naniko) Every force has a voice, every force is equal. (SARS)
張詩琴 Seecum Cheung is an artist, filmmaker and educator. She works with journalists and experts to conduct interviews with citizens, politicians and specialists in a bid to understand and reflect upon certain political moments in time. Films include interviews with politicians from the far and ultra-right in Germany with writer and journalist Richard Cooke & SBS Public Broadcasters (Interview with Lennart, 2016); coverage of the Dutch elections with writer and broadcaster Morgan Quaintance (The Dutch Window, 2017); a commission by NHS England with equality and human rights charity brap (Inequalities of BAME patients Cancer Care Study, 2018-19), and most recently, a long-term study of the gentrification of her father’s ancestral village (in Shenzhen, China) which began in April 2018 (Eviction in Shenzhen, 2019-ongoing). She currently teaches on the Social Practice Minor at Willem de Kooning Academie, Rotterdam.
鄧麗雯 Zoénie Deng is an art writer, researcher, poet, curator, and translator. She obtained her PhD degree from the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ACSA), University of Amsterdam. Her PhD project focused on non-oppositional criticality of socially engaged art in contemporary China. She was the Secondary grantee of The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Greater China Research Grant 2019-2020 at Asian Art Archive, and she conducted a project about the self-organisation of cultural practitioners in Southern China, in relation to practices in southeast Asia. Her research and artistic interests cover social practices, feminism, the decolonial, otherwise ways of living together, and non-western epistemologies and cosmologies. She is a contributor to Leap and Artforum China.
Angeliki Diakrousi is a researcher and an artist whose work examines the politics of public realms through the lens of art, architecture and technology. She is engaged with dialogical and relational methodologies, critical computing, listening practices and feminist pedagogies, and is interested in unravel the political and technological potentialities of suppressed voices. She is an Architecture graduate of the University of Patras in Greece and she holds an MA from the Experimental Publishing Master at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Her Master's studies have been funded by the Onassis Foundation. Angeliki is a member of Varia in Rotterdam and is currently involved in research work in Hybrid Publishing and Social Practices in Willem de Kooning Academy. Her work has been published in different setups, such as at Chinretsukan Gallery and Tokyo University of the Arts, the Mediterranean 18 Young Artists Biennale in Albania, gallery Nomina Nuda in the Philippines, Sign Gallery in Groningen and TENT in Rotterdam.
何穎雅 Elaine W. Ho works between the realms of time-based art, language and urban practice, and what this really means is that there are many forms of study, and many kinds of people involved. These are questions about a latent commons, questions about the sociopolitics of syntax, and questions about voices in a social space. She has worked with audio recording since 2003, but her first experiment with radio broadcast, Widow Radio Ching, took place in 2016 from a boat on the Danube River.
조수경 Clara Jo is an artist and filmmaker based in Berlin. She is currently researching psychosocial conditions that re-engage historical and ontological narratives embedded within the global health crisis.
MAI LING—founded February 2019 in Vienna—is an association as well as an artist collective, contextualizing and fostering contemporary Asian art and culture with a focus on FLINT (Female, Lesbian, Intersexual, Non-binary, Transsexual identities). MAI LING also offers a platform in which we can share our individual experiences and opinions about related subjects against racism, sexism, homophobia and any kind of prejudgment. The name “Mai Ling” refers to Gerhard Polt’s video from 1979, which represents racial stereotypes and prejudices against Asian women in the occidental world, so that it holds up a mirror to the German-speaking societies. The Asian woman in this video, “MAI LING”, is an Asian hybrid—her flight starts in Bangkok, she is wearing a kimono and cooking Chinese food. She does not speak for herself; instead, all the information about her is given by her husband who demonstrates clichés of a chauvinistic, white, racist, sexist and ignorant man. Even though the original point of departure is this old video, the approach did not lose its relevance, as the same stereotypes and clichés still linger around today. We want to give her a voice of her own.
Bea Misa-Crisostomo is the owner and founder of Ritual, a sustainable general store that deals in wholesale and retail. This zero-waste non-hierarchical enterprise is as an experiment in bio-cultural diversity and waste reduction that pays special attention to underutilized plants, food history, and ingredients. Bea prototypes models for more sustainable commodity systems through agroforestry, with a specialization in developing agricultural post-harvest processes.
Read-in is a collective that experiments with reading and memorizing. Unavoidably rooted in the specificity of the places where it is practiced, Read-in calls attention to the relationship between the content of a book and the reading of a space. Through relocating and communalizing reading, a typically private and solitary activity, Read-in activities open up spaces for grappling with the material, affective and political dimensions of “reading together” trying to conjure feminist histories of reading together for political action.
Rising Bun is a gathering of UK based artists and practitioners that came together in 2020 to find solace and alternative forms of care for one another after a long battle with institutional violence in the arts amid the corona virus pandemic. Current participants include: JJ Chan, Seecum Cheung, Denise Kwan, Tiffany Leung, and Natalie Tan.
吴索 Amy Suo Wu was born in China, grew up in Australia, and lives in The Netherlands as an artist, designer and teacher. Since 2015, she has engaged in steganographic practices such as hiding techniques, evasion tactics, and covert communication as acts of protection, survival and resistance in the face of oppression and violence. This research is now published under the title A Cookbook of Invisible Writing through Onomatopee. Her most recent interest and practice circles around literal and metaphorical approaches of mending, design as remittance and self-fulfilling prophecy and how text and textile might be woven together to form embodied publishing.
Badass Libre Fonts By Womxn, 周蕾 Rey Chow, 六合苗母 Miao Mothers Temple, 陸思培 Stephanie Lu, Marc van Elburg (Zine Depo), Yin Yin Wong, Sarjon Azouz, Tammam Azzam, Florian Cramer, Carla Leurs, 胡宇君 Philana Woo, JJ Chan, 何穎宜 Rania Ho, Cathy Park Hong, Jen Liu, 岩間朝子 Iwama Asako, Claudia Schouten, 張涵露 Zhang Hanlu, 刘嘉雯 Bubu Liu, 張子木 Zhang Zimu, Sarafina Paulina Bonita van Ast, 許思樂 Serene Hui, Simon Groot Kormelink & The Institute of Endotic Research
This website and its sounds have been gently stirred into being with the sight & sound magic of 吴索 Amy Suo Wu and 何穎雅 Elaine W. Ho, with the additional coding spells of Angeliki Diakrousi.