Red Forest
The Red Forest is a loose knit assemblage based on affinities and overlapping practices that grounds together research, art, political imagination, and social actions striving for transformative justice and ecological reparations. In 2021 they initiated a pan-continental research focusing on the intersections between contemporary extractivism and datification processes. Red Forest assembles and organizes their work with infrastructures of collective reciprocity and interdependency as actual potentiality. Their research contributes to the theoretical framework of Energetic Materialism to conceptualize urgent cultural and social processes in the defense of life and the construction of pluriversal futures in dignified flux.
Red Forest is mobilized by David Muñoz-Alcántara, Diana McCarty, Mijke van der Drift and Oleksiy Radynski, after their collective practices super collided during a 2019-2020 BAK Fellowship in Utrecht. It unfolds as a growing constellation of artists, activists, researchers, media producers, filmmakers, philosophers, educators and time travelers realizing interdisciplinary projects. In 2021, their ongoing research on Extractivism, Datafication, and Transformative Justice was supported by the Kone Foundation in Finland. They are producing an experimental social and durational performance series in Kyiv and Berlin titled Sambatas Stagings, supported by Goethe-Institut Co-Production Fund Kyiv and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. In 2022, they are convening Nomadic Cosmologies and Fugitive Power - Red Forest Radiograms as the German Pavilion of the the 23rd Triennale Milano International Exhibition Unknown Unknowns. An Introduction to Mysteries.
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 and educator Mijke van der Drift works on ethics as a focal point in multi-disciplinary research about social transformation. Van der Drift is a lecturer at University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, as of fall 2020, and is a tutor at Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. She will also be a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge in 2020–21, as part of the Revolutionary Papers project, in collaboration with the London School of Economics and the University of the Western Cape. In addition, van der Drift is currently working on her book Nonnormative Ethics: The Dynamics of TransFormation. She obtained a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London, London. Her current project focuses on multilogical ethics and generosity, and is provisionally titled The Logic of Loss in Bonding. The book chapter Radical Transfeminism: Trans as anti-static ethics escaping neoliberal encapsulation, co-written with poet Nat Raha, is forthcoming in New Feminist Studies: Twenty-first-century Critical Interventions, ed. Jennifer Cooke. 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 Amsterdam and 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.
(coming soon)
Red Forest in conversation with Franco “Bifo” Berardi
Red Forest in conversation with Franco “Bifo” Berardi
(coming soon)
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. 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.
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. 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.
(coming soon)
Mijke van der Drift in conversation with Jay Bernard and Thomas Nail, 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.
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.
Mijke van der Drift in conversation with Jay Bernard and Thomas Nail, 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.
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.
(coming soon)
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
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
(coming soon)
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.
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.
(coming soon)
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.
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.
(coming soon)
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.
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.
(coming soon)
Imagination is central for crossing the turbulent political waves of time, space and bodies, and to read an impossible biography of the ocean. Navigating the haunted reverse of transatlantic crossings is to escape the ocean as a mode of colonial law, violence and climate catastrophe. The history of transnational and transatlantic black internationalism become a driving force to liberate the water, collective potentials and reclaim its flow and power, and to restore its ecological balance. A rite of passage that is both bitter and sweet and unleashes potent forces of change.
Imagination is central for crossing the turbulent political waves of time, space and bodies, and to read an impossible biography of the ocean. Navigating the haunted reverse of transatlantic crossings is to escape the ocean as a mode of colonial law, violence and climate catastrophe. The history of transnational and transatlantic black internationalism become a driving force to liberate the water, collective potentials and reclaim its flow and power, and to restore its ecological balance. A rite of passage that is both bitter and sweet and unleashes potent forces of change.
(coming soon)
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.
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.
(coming soon)
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.
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.
Radio Raheem
Radio Raheem started in 2017 as an independent publisher and media company. As a Radio, they explore the most interesting facets of the national and international music scene, but they also investigate the manifold world of content and culture. They select and create culturally relevant content in order to tell original stories and foster talent while doing research and experimenting through the independent media.
The Radio Booth is currently located in the spaces of Triennale Milano and there, surrounded by contemporary culture’s finest, they broadcast every day audio/video shows.
www.radioraheem.it
reboot.fm
Free Artists' Radio
Art, Discourse & Electronic music on 88.4 Mhz Berlin & 90.7 MHz in Potsdam.
www.reboot.fm
The German Pavilion at the 23rd Triennale Milano International Exhibition is convened by Red Forest on a commission from the Goethe-Institut Mailand and supported by the German Federal Foreign Office. Media Partner Radio Raheem Milan and reboot.fm Berlin. Pavilion Design David Muñoz-Alcántara, Production Andrea Angeli Architetto. Grafic Design UAU Studio.
