performingbordersRADIO performingborders

WHAT IS THE MIGRANT ARTS COMMUNITY? A CLUSTER NETWORK UNDER SPECIFIC LABELS? THE ACT OF SOLIDARITY OVER TRAUMA? OR CAN WE TAKE A DIFFERENT APPROACH?
Join Bristol-based performance artist Howl Yuan and Ania Varez in a conversation about social gathering, identity, collaborative friendship, celebration, and joy-making practices.

Original Broadcast:
Montez Press Radio
24th November 2023
4pm at radio.montezpress.com

performingbordersRadio explores the entanglement between Live Art and notions and lived experiences of intersectional and transnational borders, bi-monthly on Montez Press Radio. This radio space hosts and shares collaborative, sound-based performance work created with and by artists in the performingborders network.

This month, we end our radio residency with a conversation between performingborders and Howl Yuan to discuss socially engaged performance practices and the importance of using cultural work to weave connections between people and communities. Throughout the episode, we’ll hear excerpts from Howl’s work with sound, from song-making to podcasts and audio walks.

Howl Yuan, or Yuan Cheng-Po, is a Taiwanese performance maker/writer/curator/researcher. His interests cross-cultural identity, mobility, site/place/space, and decolonized narratives. His works span different formats but are primarily performance-based, and are presented in theatres, galleries, festivals, beaches or gardens.

Given the on-going genocide in Gaza, performingborders created this episode as a space to share resources in the form of texts, poems, music, and the reading of manifestos and call-outs generated around the world from groups in solidarity with Palestinian liberation. It is a radio space to echo the voices of those demanding justice and voicing the way in which all of our struggles are entangled - none of us are free until we all are. Tune in to find a space for collective grief, solidarity, seeds of resistance, and calls to action.

SONG: Hassan Shaikh - Ana Dammi Falasteeni

EXCERPT FROM: DAYRA AND COMMUNAL DEBT by Lara Khaldi on behalf of and with The Question of Funding

SONG: Lowkey- Long Live Palestine

POEM: IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

SONG: يا فلسطينية | فرقة يلالان وفرقة اسكندريلا | Ya Falastinia | Yalalan Band & Eskenderella Band

SONG: Ana Tijoux - Somos Sur

CALL OUT: COMO FEMINISTAS NO PODEMOS PERMANECER EN SILENCIO // COMO FEMINISTAS DECIMOS NO AL GENOCIDIO EN PALESTINA

SONG: KOFIA -  Leve Palestina, Krossa Sionismen

CALL OUT: An Urgent Call from Palestinian Trade Unions: End all Complicity, Stop Arming Israel

SONG: Emel Mathlouthi - Naci en Palestina آمال مثلوثي

OPEN LETTER: AN OPEN LETTER FROM THE ART COMMUNITY TO CULTURAL ORGANIZATIONS

SONG: Sabreen - Smoke Of The Volcanoes

SONG: Sabreen - On Wishes

📻 This month we’re talking to Pouya Ehsaei about the Lips To The Moon project, listening to some of their favourite recordings from the performances, talking about multidisciplinary collaboration, and thinking more about what it means to work transnationally through sound.

✨🌙 From the Lips to the Moon is an unusual music and poetry performance. An immersive space made through the synergies of words, melodies, languages and beats. Created by electronic musician and composer Pouya Ehsaei and performance maker and word trickster Tara Fatehi, From the Lips to the Moon is a regular music and poetry night in London where they invite other poets and musicians to join them in creating live improvised performances. It is an event full of riveting live music, mind-bending beats, fierce poetry, absurd texts and goosebumps. The performances are often streamed to the Palestine-based Radio-Alhara.

This episode was recorded live Montez Press Radio studios in London, on Thursday 28 September | 4 PM

performingbordersRADIO: Episode 3 with Untethered Magic | July 2023

This month performingborders shares an audio collage of their time working with Untethered Magic, from visiting their space on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya in February 2023 during a two-week residency, to ongoing digital conversations on transnational collaboration. Untethered Magic, run by artists Syowia Kyambi, Kibe Wangunyu, and Ciaran Nash, is both a home and an independently run residency space that encourages growth, independence, and processes of unlearning. It is a space being set up to live with the land, thinking through sustainability in environmental and social terms.

During their time collaborating, performingborders and Untethered Magic have discussed ideas of place, sustainability, and live art, thinking through the creation of alternative spaces for experimental work. In this show, they share conversations between the two collectives, alongside readings and short performative interventions by artists who joined them during the residency in Kenya including Nekoye Ommeh, Ngwatilo Mawiyoo, Esther Kamba, and Joseph Kanyenje.

Edited by: Olive Mondegreen

Artists (including pronouns):

Anahi Saravia Herrera she/her
Alessandra Cianetti she/her
Xavier de Sousa he/him + they/them
Syowia Kyambi she/her
Kibe Wangunyu he/him
Ngwatilo Mawiyoo she/her
Nekoye Ommeh she/her
Esther Kamba she/her
Joseph Kanyenje he/him
Ciaran Nash he/him


Brief description of show:
performingbordersRadio explores the entanglement between Live Art and notions and lived experiences of intersectional and transnational borders, bi-monthly on Montez Press Radio. This radio space hosts and shares collaborative, sound-based performance work created with and by artists in the performingborders network.

Tune in to performingbordesRadio, an exploration into the entanglement between Live Art, sound, and notions and lived experiences of intersectional and transnational borders, bi-monthly on Montez Press Radio. In this new show, performingborders take to the radio to share collaborative, sound-based performance work created with and by artists in their network.

In our second episode as Radio residents, we meet with artist Diana Damian Martin to talk through her commission Spells for a border town (retrocedare) which was originally commissioned for the performingborders platform in April 2021. In Romanian, Retrocedare refers to the process of returning something, for example, a territory, back to the person or entity that had previously been ceded (usually) during a violent or enforced take-over. In this episode, we’ll be re-sharing some of the audio work from this commission, re-visiting the political situation of the territories that mark the commission and talking, as well as touching on the entanglement between the process of re-ceding and decolonial practices on the peripheries of Europe.

The episode and commission features work and thinking by artists: Diana Damian Martin, Mihaela Drăgan, Rusanda Curcă, Iulia Mărăcine, and Flo Thamer. 

Diana Damian Martin is an artist and researcher, working at the intersection between writing, politics and performance. Her work concerns alternative critical epistemologies and feminist modes of exchange, interventionist and political performance and the ecological and representational poetics of migration, with a distinct focus on Eastern Europe. Recent collaborations include performingborders, The Albany, Dansehallerne, The Wellcome Collection and Tate Modern. She co-hosts The Department of Feminist Conversations and Something Other, and co-runs the Serbo-Romanian critical cooperative Critical Interruptions, artistic research committee Generative Constraints and is a core member of Migrants in Culture. Her recent publications include (states of) wake: Dedicating Performance and Critical Interruptions Vol 1: Steakhouse LIVE. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Performance Arts at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and once appeared in an issue of Private Eye, where her work was described as obscure, impenetrable and unclear. Twitter: @DianaADamian