« ABA » Air SALON: Andrés Villa Torres, Rhona Mühlebach, Alexei Kuzmich

Andrés Villa Torres (MEX/ CH) In this short radio essay, Andrés Villa Torres suggests that the excessive speed at which information travels is pushed mainly by private economic interests. These private affairs are targeting the speed at which information can be mined and traded from every aspect of human life. At this accelerated pace, full automation and cloud computing will become ubiquitous in the next decade, enabling all sorts of new technology-enhanced social consumption and exploitation. Thus, the electro smog surrounding us will increase and social-exploitation remains unquestioned – unless we start putting a price to our data-productive activities and start reclaiming e-smog free air spaces. Is there anything left to say regarding the so called "users" in 2020, who are actually humans, citizens, workers, and have lately been abused as raw commodity by the information economies? https://andresvillatorres.work/

Rhona Muehlebach (CH/UK) We will be listening to a 20 minutes radio-piece put together by our current resident from Switzerland Rhona Mühlebach. We will take you on an audio open studio visit in Berlin Grunewald. Rhona Mühlebach has written a short narrative in which different threads of her recent research are woven together, and presented as a short radio play. It is an unfinished audio sketch of her new video-piece which she is working on during her residency here in Berlin. By trying out the written language, taking it into one's mouth, the rewriting of it begins immediately. After the play we will be listening to the song “The Stillness” by Lafawndah. The idea of an auditive open studio appears again: Rhona Mühlebach has chosen this song as it was often playing in her studio and something resonates between the song, her reading and the narrative she has written. https://rhonamuehlebach.com/

Alexei Kuzmich (BLR) For the radio broadcast, Alexei Kuzmich will present an interview on the topic of political actionism with Aleksander Komarov an artist, a native of Belarus, who during his student years in Minsk, practiced the art of actionism. The work is a counter-propaganda to radio as a sound medium, where the classical political field is replaced by the aesthetic one. The work uses inserts from the first youtube search for Belarus and Germany on August 9, 2020, when the presidential elections were held in Belarus. Actionism is not detached from the context and environment, and at the same time the environment, through the media, acts as a quasi-representative system, which reproduces an aesthetic statement in the engaged political field, depending on the direction and vectorization of regional policy. Instagram: @art_kuzmich

ABA Air SALON is a radio format produced by Air Berlin Alexanderplatz, a Berlin based artist initiative dealing with the distribution and documentation of forms of collective and experimental knowledge production. The broadcasts come from different locations in Berlin where we organize salons. At these salons we meet with local actors, artists, scientists and other cultural producers to exchange around research based artistic projects and practices. You can find more information about our program at www.airberlinalexanderplatz.de

ABA (Air Berlin Alexanderplatz) e.V., is a research-oriented artists' initiative founded in Berlin in 2009 by the artists Susanne Kriemann & Aleksander Komarov. The programme focuses on ephemeral artistic research and collective and experimental knowledge production. ABA’s operations consist of the conception, curation and implementation of various presentational formats: The organization of salons in different locations acros the city, the release of publications, the stewardship of a residency-program and the maintenance of a website as a central place for documentation and achivation of these forms of ephmeral knowledge production.