Publishing a selection of her radiophonic essays here for the first time, I Speak Radio reflects Anne Bromley's collaborative radio practice.
Since 2010, Anna Bromley has been inviting artists, activists and cultural researchers into the radio studio to explore language and voice together, in the context of sound, politics and everyday life. What began as an artists' radio research format has developed over the years into a series of exhibition pieces focusing on radio and its visible and invisible transmission bodies.
Publishing a selection of her radiophonic essays here for the first time, I Speak Radio reflects Bromley's collaborative radio practice. The publication also provides insight into the corresponding exhibition formats of these projects, including cooperations with a large number of artists, activists, radio makers and theorists. An index of images and texts on Bromley's other artistic works is inserted into the book. I Speak Radio opens with Bromley's eponymous multimedia essay on the feminist appropriation of early radio technology in the 1920s. A Voice Exists in Voicing, the series of radio essays and sonic portraits with which Bromley opened the Manifesta Radio in Prishtina in the summer of 2022, comprises the core of the book. The accompanying visual element to this section is a series of drawings by Michael Fesca. Contextualizing texts by Catherine Nichols and Hedwig Fijen provide an introduction to A Voice Exists in Voicing. Finally, Bromley talks to media activist Diana McCarty about the politics of persistent radio voices and considers critical perspectives on radio as a medium within art exhibitions.
The reader series Scriptings: Political Scenarios publishes carefully selected scripts and texts by artists that refer neither to academic forms nor to purely literary forms of writing, but rather embed "text" as a fully integral part of contemporary political and visual art practice.
Anna Bromley (born 1971) is an artist and writer in Berlin. Her furtive radio listening in the disintegrating GDR forms the starting point of her artistic research on clandestine protest radio. Following an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach, she dispatches her own radio voice in search of improvised radio speech beyond state-supported broadcasters, hand-soldered amplifiers, police surveillance protocols, and polyphonic memories. In the process, she combines her auditory essays with objects and installations, performances and processual drawings.
Bromley's radio assemblages have been heard and seen in the German Pavilion at the 23rd Triennale di Milano, at Manifesta 14 in Pristina, at beuys2021 in Düsseldorf, the Tbilisi Biennale, at the Akademie der Künste der Welt Cologne, at the Akademie der Künste and HKW—both in Berlin, and documenta14 in Kassel.
Edited by Achim Lengerer and Michael Fesca.
Contributions by Anna Bromley, Diana McCarty, Hedwig Fijen, Catherine Nichols, Tetsuo Kogawa, Alla Mitrofanova, JD Zazie.
