ANTENNE 8 is a showcase in the Konstabler multi-storey car park, Töngesgasse 8, 60311 Frankfurt,

 

ANTENNE 8 provides a rehearsal space for experimental artistic work. For becoming artists, living or working in the Rhine-Main region, who are invited to make the vitrine a temporary display for their questions and research, and search for questions.



ANTENNE 8 is accessible day and night. A test station where big questions on small scale can find their form — acoustically, visually, performatively, in word, image, sound and time-spending, also with a view towards Hanau, Kassel, Halle, Munich, Trondheim further and further back.

 

ANTENNE 8 is a satellite of the project The Art of Counter-Investigation, in which experimental, essayistic, conceptual artistic approaches and procedures are taken up in order to find out how one can take care of relationships in and to the neighbourhood, in dimensions that, when they come to the surface, are not the same or already representative or representable.

surroundings: down the street, around the corner (walkings & pannings)

antenne8

Töngesgasse 8, Frankfurt/Main

(#1) Coming To Being (Contributions to a first group picture)

FURTHER SATELLITES >>>>>

THE ART OF COUNTER INVESTIGATION

HOW DO ANTENNAS WORK?


TRANSMITTER-RECEIVER ENERGY TRANSFER SYSTEMS

MALMÖ

ANTENNA X

(#2) 8/3/22-5/4/70-1/3/31 (desultor’s notes)

TRONDHEIM

ANTENNE X

(#3) Thao Eder, Mehrraumspiel

Thão Eder's "Mehrraumspiel" (Mulitspaceplay) is a gradually growing, expansive mixed media installation that refers to Jacques Prévert's poem, "Page d'écriture" (first published in Paroles in 1946). We have de-manipulated, reconfigured and condensed Kurt Kusenberg's adaptation "Rechenstunde" (maths lesson) (1957) in order to return to the rhythm of the original, against the background of which the escape becomes much clearer with the help of poetry.

 

THE RIGHT TO HOST

THE LIVING ROOM PROJECT


Sandi Hilal Living rooms are traditionally where the private home opens itself to the guest, the foreigner, the outsider. They function as a transitional space and a passage between the domestic and the public. In Arab culture, the living room is always ready to host; it is the most ornamented part of the house, never in disorder, and often has fruit, nuts, and black coffee ready to be offered at all times. It is highly symbolic, curated, and cared for. The Living Room project is about deploying this type of space in politicized contexts to invert the relationship between host and guest. It is about providing a space to people who do not otherwise feel at home. The project started quite small, but it has been growing and expanding into a network, with locations in Boden, Fawwar, Stockholm, Ramallah, Eindhoven, Paris, and soon Anchorage.   continue reading ....

 

PODCAST: A conversation with Sandi Hilal

If we understand hosting as power, what does it mean to the powerless? 

(#4) MH Gutberlet, Voisinages / Nachbarschaften

ODENSE

ANTENNE X

.... And why does this matter? Because although today we predominantly use the Internet, this intangible place has been transformed into a polarized, political battleground that generates concrete affects on our private lives, hurting democratic systems and human rights. 

The history of radio, as well as the Internet, is built on the promise of connectivity and plurality that has become an instrument of political propaganda, persecution, and displacement. And it is from plurality of content and communication strategies that enables us to create resistance, so it matters.

Diaty Diallo's novel, Two Seconds of Burning Air is the occasion for an extended investigation with connections between fiction, investigative journalism and a persistent threat to youth. Voisinages / Nachbarschaften unfolds an existing public discourse in France on racist violence and its legal trivialisation, which exists in other forms and orientations in German. What can we learn from our neighbours? What can they learn from us? Where are openings for understanding complexity?
Voisinages / Neighbourhoods is the attempt/the beginning of a translocal cartography.

 



Fereidoun M. Esfandiary becoming FM–2030


In his notebooks, he scripted mock interview questions and his charming, evasive answers, preparing himself for the media:

Q: What does FM stand for?
A: I haven’t decided yet. Open. Let’s say it stands for Optimism and Immortality.
Q: How does it stand for optimism and immortality?
A: I was never a good speller…
Q: How old are you?
A: Chronologically, in 50s. Biologically, in 30s. Psychologically, ageless.
Q: Are you running away from something?
A: Yes, I am running away from obsolescence.
Q: Where are you from?
A: I am from the future.

But his notebooks also reveal a more authentic rationale, perhaps the final chapter in his lifelong efforts to grasp at who, precisely, he truly was: “Coin a name. A new name that best defines my ideals. My perceptions of who I am. Who I should like to be… I am infinitely ahead of where I was. I am gaining momentum. I am accelerating into the Future… I am a Futurist. Why not a name that is Futurist? I do not believe in the family. Why then a family name? I have no nationality. Why then a national name?” And so, taking stock of the clippings he had sourced for inspiration, he slowly worked out the combination. He considered FM_84, FM 500, FM X1, FM + 1, FM Positive, FM 2121, FM 2020, and FM 2050 along the way. Finally, in about 1985, Fereidoun M. Esfandiary settled on officially becoming FM-2030. It was a fine name. It contained both even and odd numbers, it represented a time well into the twenty-first century — indeed, the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth — and more than anything else, simply had a nice ring to it. In the margin of his yellow legal pad, he wrote, “2030 is a magical number because 2030 will be a magical time.” Let us hope he was right.

 

Benjamin Tiven: The Future Takes Forever

PODCASTS / RADIO:


RADIO UTOPISTAN

Radio Utopistan talks to visionary people from around the world.

Utopian ideas drive us as humans, they drive humankind and humanity. And Radio Utopistan wants to find out what drives those visionary people. It was the belief that we could fly, conquer disease or live in permanent peace that gave women and men the courage to take risks, to step out, to try things and also to fail.


THE PANAFRICAN SPACE STATION (PASS) 

Working in transitory spaces and at the intersections between different fields, organising sound, music and words into new forms of knowledge, PASS is a machine for travelling at the speed of thought – it borrows its slogan “There are other worlds out there they never told you about” from the philosopher, composer and bandleader Sun Ra.

(#5) Anna Berger & Frank Bossert, A Call for Vulnerability


Wir wollen Nunancen, Gradienten der Wahlmöglichkeiten. // We want nuances, gradients of choice!
Sich eine Blöße geben, verletzbar sein, liebenswert. // Try to show weakness, try and be vulnerable, tender, lovable.
Fühlen sie sich verletzlich? // Do you feel vulnerable?
Wer das sieht, sieht in der eigenen Schwäche eine Stärke.  // If you see it, you may see a strength in your own weakness.
Und in der Schwäche des Gegenübers die Ähnlichkeit zu sich selbst. // And in the weakness of the other the similarity to yourself. 
Angst, Ambivalenzen, gegensätzliche Positionen: // Fear, ambivalences, opposing points of view: 
anerkennen, trotzdem die Menschen sehen. // endure them, acknowledge them, remain open, remain human.
Nichts ist nur so, sondern immer auch so. // Nothing is only so, but always also so. 
Das wollen wir uns fragen und die Passant:innen. // This is what we want to ask ourselves and the passers-by. 
Die inneren Kritiker mal in die Nuancen weisen, ihnen die Facetten lesen. // Point out possibilites to the inner critics, feed them facets.
Überdosis Dichotomin®? Nimm noch ein Ambivalium! // Dichotomin® overdose? Take another Ambivalium™!


ARTISTS & SOUND


Aura Satz

Speaking sirens: preemptive listening 

'Speaking Sirens' is a podcast for Aura Satz’s 'Warnings in Waiting' exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (09.06.23 – 06.08.23). It is part of Satz's larger 'Preemptive Listening' film and research project on emergency listening and alternative siren sounds.


Jacek Smolcki 

Inaudible Cities 

What stories about the city can be revealed when our attention shifts from the central to peripheral, visual to sonic, from the extra- to infra-ordinary?


 

The Tower Project

Tower is an exploration of cultural, environmental, material and political testimonies of the Gleiwitz (today Gliwice) radio tower constructed in the 1930s in the close vicinity to the border between Germany and Poland. The project is an instance of what I came to describe as an expanded archaeology of mediations that takes into account not only human- but also other-than-human spaces and tempauralities. 


 

Walking Festival of Sound 

is a transdisciplinary event exploring the role of walking through and listening to our everyday surroundings. It combines a number of free and public events including walking performances, walking seminars and listening sessions, all taking place in diverse public spaces and online. Walking Festival of Sound facilitates a meeting point for the international network of practitioners and researchers interested in sound and walking.


Ludwig Berger

is a landscape sound artist, musician and educator. In his compositions, installations and performances, he enables intimate and playful sonic encounters with plants, animals, buildings and geological entities. In his musical work, Berger produces sonic eco-fictions with processed and synthetic sounds. He studied electroacoustic composition at the University of Music Weimar and Musicology, Art History and Literature at the University of Eichstätt. As a sound researcher and teacher at the Institute for Landscape Architecture at ETH Zurich from 2015-2022, Berger studied the sonic dimension of Japanese gardens, alpine glaciers and urban landscapes. He has composed sound and music for award-winning films and theatre pieces and curates the landscape sound festival Sonic Topologies in Zurich and the experimental music label Vertical Music


AND MORE, REFERENCES


JOURNAL OF SONIC STUDIES


As an object of study, our sonic environment seems to be a quite recent discovery (with the exception of music). It is only at the end of the past millennium that more and more books were published on the aural relation living beings have to their environment. However, one of the most important and trailblazing books on sonic studies already appeared in 1977, R. Murray Schafer’s The Tuning of the World. As Brandon LaBelle writes, the book marks out ‘the parameters, delineations, and categories of acoustic experience and its material operations.’ (LaBelle, 2007, 202) 

 



COPENHAGEN

ANTENNA X

(#6) Peter Sun, Hybrid Space

 

As an artist, Peter Sun experiments with Korean and German cultures  constantly influencing each other. Media allow an unstoppable development, a morphing; the question that then follows is: What does this do to you personally? With your perception? "I feel neither really Korean nor really German. It's more as if a third space is emerging in me, where cultures meet and merge. This is reflected in my way of life and my perception."


(#7) Brigitta Kuster und Vassilis Tsianos feat. Al Abdani Quaida, 2005


The work by Athens-based artist Al Abdani Quaida examines an incident that took place in March 2002 and became known as the Rastanski Lozja case. In this village near Skopje, it later emerged that Macedonian security forces had shot dead seven men who, according to the official version of the then Interior Minister Ljube Boškoski, were considered 'terrorists' or 'Islamic fundamentalists'.


Brigitta Kuster and Vassilis Tsianos comment on Al Abdani Quaida's documentary work process - a complex and contradictory picture of the interplay between transit migration, globalised media, national interests and the 'war on terror' - and present reflections on current approaches to research, representation and reconstruction at the current EU external border in south-eastern Europe, which go hand in hand with very similar para-state configurations of violence.

 


 

On the occasion of the film screening of ZUSTAND UND GELÄNDE/STATUS AND TERRAIN, we searched for specific locations of so-called wild concentration camps in Frankfurt, Offenbach and Hanau, which were organised immediately after the NSDAP seized power in order to filter out and physically destroy politically active opponents from public life. We came across a few addresses of these wild concentration camps, but also the legal foundations that legalised the wanton destruction of parliamentary-democratic participation and organisation.
ANTENNE 8, research and display: Marie-Hélène Gutberlet and Johanna Schlegel

 

(# 08) Ute Adamczewski, Zustand und Gelände/Status and Terrain


When first viewing Zustand und Gelände, we might be under the impression it belongs to a well-known tradition of historical documentaries. Long shots, extremely slow all-round views, steady panning: the image patiently describes a series of urban sites and landscapes of the former German Democratic Republic (Saxony and Thuringia). Through highly elaborate arrangements of archives from different sources (police reports, survivors’ testimonies, administrative correspondence, and more), an off-screen voice establishes what these places set the stage for in March 1933: the Nazi concentration system and an elimination regime of all political opposition. Especially noteworthy, in this film, is the extremely attentive channelling towards still unknown times and geographies of the horror Hitler inflicted on the first victims: people with sympathies for communism, activists, trade unionists, socio-democratic journalists, and so on. The act of relating landscape studies to archives builds memory and historical knowledge while also documenting oblivion and erasure. But Ute Adamczewski does not simply abandon her first film in the hands of such conventional ideas of history and documentary approaches. A video artist and montage technician like herself (The Dubai in me, FID 2010) shapes a way of thinking history in far more ambitious terms thus lending an ear, over time, to echoes of such a traumatic past – namely the politics of memory as they succeeded one another under di erent regimes – and doubling the chronicles of Nazi repression. Her montage techniques produce an increasingly complex archeology attempting to disclose, in each landscape, the layering of memorial writing. The GDR under Stalin, a re-unified Germany: each era, each and every regime writes and erases, sometimes on the same monument. Zustand und Gelände sketches out the spectral and unquiet history of Germany haunted by Nazism. Its deceptive calm is emergency withheld. (N.F.)

From the FID Marseille Website.  

(# 09) Nazlı Moripek, Ölüme karşı tılsımlar (Talisman to ward off death)


Anyone who leaves their familiar home to emigrate - with the hope of a better future, a more free life or simply to survive - takes pieces of their everyday cultural life with them. Things can help them to carry what they have left behind with them or to ward off impending disaster. Motifs that were used in Kelims, for example, are forgotten today, as is the significance of talismans, which were intended to protect against death and misfortune.
In her artistic work, Nazlı Moripek explores various forms of expression of remembrance and focuses on the car as a means of transport on migration routes in her site-specific work Ölüme karşı tılsımlar (talisman against death). It focusses on the specially selected things that are supposed to bring luck, which will hopefully also work in the future. And yes, what would we do without these habits? Last but not least, the installation brings the display case in the Konstabler car park, built in 1959, and the context of labour recruitment for reconstruction back into play.