Raumdeuter Radio: Göteborg[SE]

9 - [Kungssten > Angered Centrum] by Kasra Seyed Alikhani

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Equal Temperament is an experimental music project by Kasra Seyed Alikhani that takes its name from the standard tuning system of Western music which dominates most music software. The project collages impressions, recordings, and thoughts evoked by tram number 9 and its destinations in the form of a musical or an album. The route illustrates the large geographical distances that contribute to the segregation of Göteborg. With the thematic lens of journey/limbo, ideals of “Swedishness” are explored in relationship to the tram’s route. The project utilises music software recently developed by musician and researcher Khyam Allami that challenges the western bias in music software.

Track List: 1. Intro (0:0), 2. Samarin (2:17), 3. Bara spöken kvar (10:45), 4. Mina besverigelser (16:59), 5. Breaking Barriers (21:25), 6. Svensson bränner ut dig (27:58), 7. Efter resan (34:15), 8. Biljettkontroll (36:51), 9. Helhjärtad (38:46)

Script: Kasra Seyed Alikhani
Mastering: Philip Granqvist
Voices: Jessica Fredin, Kasra Seyed Alikhani, Shoeb Hashem, Mehdi Seyed Alikhani, Shahla Kandloosi
Music: Kasra Seyed Alikhani
Text consultation: Jessica Fredin, Charlotte Malmenholt
Translation: Hanna Skoglar

Bio: Kasra Seyed Alikhani sets up fictional worlds that are both distancing and inviting through painting, film, music, and installation. These become stages where sources ranging from personal experience, theory, and mass-culture get pieced together, re-coded, and displaced. Through these settings and narratives, he aims to highlight and re-perform the subtle menace lurking in certain imagery, attitudes, or cultural expressions that might go unnoticed by its commonplace. He is interested in dissimulation and sameness and recently how these themes relate to fantasies of illness/wellness.
Website: cargocollective.com/kasra, Instagram: @kasraalikhani

Translation from Swedish


Flyg - [Landvetter Airport > Nils Ericsonterminalen] by Rose Brander

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Rose Brander presents an aural response to the proposed high-speed rail link between Borås and Göteborg. We are raised on dreams of modernisation and progress; is it subversive to resist the one-way future consisting only of growth? To Whom Are You Responsible? Reflects on notions of disturbance, silence, cultural heritage and “untouched” nature. If the truth is singular can a dialogue be possible? An attempt to focus on the development of questions rather than fixed positions.

Script and audio: Rose Brander
Voices: John Brander, Iris Brander, Johannes Brander, Pepsi, Gizmo
Mastering: Rose Brander
Literary references: The Mushroom at the end of the world, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2015. Climate Leviathan, Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann, 2018. The View from the Train, Patrick Keiller, 2013. The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong, Donald Kroodsma. 2007
Context references: Göteborg-Borås tågprojektet. Gesebol byalag och Bygdegårdsförening. Red listed species in Sweden 2020. Gesebol Facebook gruppen
Special Thanks: MC Coble, Cara Tolmie, Marie Trollius, Lou Wolthers

Bio: "I am interested in the potential of social opportunities through making artworks, and exploring expanded notions of practice through collaboratively creating spaces, discussions and events. I tend to respond to the pre-existing, deconstructing and using my surroundings. I use found materials, objects, information or collections as starting points that I then re-curate, classify, arrange and remix. I often employ a variety of formats, materials and time frames; using film, sound, performance and space in order to promote dialogue and experience with an audience."

Translation from Swedish


25 - [Linnéplatsen > Länsmansgården Svarte Mosse] by Mariella Ottosson & Loke Berg

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X is a montage work incorporating voices, ambience and western inspired music – treating the sonic trough cinematographic traditions and storytelling. A fragmented narrative on acts of naming, the sense of belonging and illusions of arrival, is laid out in Swedish, Arabic and English, where the concept of a ‘dark science’ is held central. Analogies between a politicised ‘west’ and the characteristics of a ‘wild west’, aims to raise questions on the ethical compromise and lawlessness embedded in capitalism and ideas of ‘modernity’ – referencing, for instance, Carl Linnaeus's questionable work on the human species and the first X-ray diffraction image of DNA fiber; Photo 51.

Script: Mariella Otto
Music written and produced by: Loke Berg
On trumpet: Jonas Due
Voices: Hanna Mächs, Matthew Branham, Roua Abohassan
Mastering: Joakim Lindberg
Translation: Mariella Otto, Roua Abohassan
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds: Cover performed by Kent Weight & Svante Noa.(Originally written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney for The Beatles, Producer George Martin. Released on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely hearts Club Band, Label Parlophone, 1967).
Literary references: Clarice Lispector, A breath of life, (Translation Johnny Lorenz, New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2012. First published in 1977). Mare Kandre, Deliria, (Hanssons Bok, 2009, First published in 1992). Adania Shibli, Touch, (Clockroot Books, 2010. First published in 2002). Here translated to Arabic from English, by Roua Abohassan.

Bio: Mariella Louise Otto is a Swedish artist working between Malmö and Lisbon. She received her Master in Fine Arts at Malmö Art Academy, 2019 and have exhibited at Bloc Projects (Sheffield, GB), Galleri KVIT (Copenhagen, DK), KICA (Krasnodar, RU), Skissernas Museum (Lund, SE) and Inter Arts Center (Malmö, SE). After graduation she received the Assistant grant from the Swedish Arts Council, to work with visual artist Ângela Ferreira in Lisbon in 2020.Concerned with the body's social and physical choreography, as well as with language in writing and ‘speech’, questions of embodiment, enactment and spectatorship are at the very core of Otto’s praxis. Collecting information and images, in an associative and collage like manner, she merges archival findings with her own materials; unfolding as video, text, sculpture and photography – often presented as installations, assemblages or montages. The dubbed voice of an oyster, Joan of Arc’s convulsions and Facist-utopian poetry, present themselves within the performative and scenographic – functioning as staged images which lay a foundation or ‘composes a reading’ of speculative character. Loke Berg is a musician based in Malmö, Sweden.
Website: mariellaotto.com, instagram: @mariella_louise_otto

Translation from Arabic/Swedish


50 - [Korsvägen > Frölunda Torg] by Nontokozo Tshabalala

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Nontokozo Tshabalala's A Journey of Journeys explores two journeys through the lens of the 50 bus between Korsvägen and Frölunda Torg: that route and a taxi ride from Johannesburg CBD to Soweto, South Africa. Tshabalala explores the legacies of segregation and the way cultural and societal norms enforce a way of being on public transport. For Tshabalala the trip to and from Frölunda Torg feels a little too familiar. Crossing highways, lavish neighbourhoods, fields of nothingness, construction sites. It reminds her of home. A little colder though. Both ends of the ride, literally worlds apart, bring questions of displacement, equality, safety, ethnicity and culture.

Script and voice: Nontokozo Tshabalala
Mastering: Joe Rowley
Technical Support: Gabriel Nils Edvinsson

Bio: "My work is an endless journey of self-discovery. Inspired by my nephew, Siyamthanda (Ncufi) who asked why he was "this colour" referring to his brown skin, my work not only celebrates being black and Afrikan but also explores the questions that I have about myself and the world around me. I believe there are many different ways of saying things and so I use the best medium to have a particular conversation. I also use social design and my artistic practice as a space to unfold my curiosities about myself as a black woman and Afrikan and create more spaces for other black people to find themselves too or at least question the wonder that we are. Through the lens of Afrofuturism - grounded in decolonisation - I am allowed to dream of a world where we are safe, loved and free. And therefore then the work I create is for Ncufi and his generation so that they do not have to fight to be themselves but to just exist."
Instagram: @future_of_brown


99 - [Hjalmar Brantingsplatsen > Kungssten] by Kolbrún Inga Söring

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In The G-Spot, Kolbrún Inga Söring activates the relationship between the city and the listener. The G-Spot invites the listener on a slightly erotic journey. It invites them to think about their own gaze upon the city; to engage with its agency, with its power, its complex and layered nature, its age, blemishes and new facades, its tailored and awkward infrastructure. The work ask the traveler to enter into a negotiation with the city. The negotiation is scenic, sensory and bold, stimulating the listeners body through the fabric of transportation and offering a new perspective on seemingly familiar environments.

Script, audio, voice and masetering: Kolbrún Inga Söring
Special thanks: Sam Message, who held my hand through this process, who contributed some golden sentences to the script writing.

Bio: Kolbrún Inga Söring’s artistic research explores possibilities of using the body as an autonomous site of provocation; problematising cis-heteronormative ideals while questioning the deeply rooted myth of masculine desire. For Chevron Moustache, through the tool of autotheory, Söring engages in a process of performative writing: rethinking popular narratives by unpacking their own troubled relationship with said ideals and desires within a framework of self-representational body politics, body modification and politics of desire.
Kolbrun Inga Söring is a gender queer artist working in Gothenburg whose work spans several areas of artistic expression from performance, video work and site-specific installation to social engineering and cultural production. Söring hosts THIS IS THE QUEER BAR as well as being the founder and curator of the upcoming festival ENQUEERY: Festival of Queer Curiosity and cofounder of Status Queer - a non-profit working to inject new energy into the LGBTQ+ cultural scene in Gothenburg.
Website: cargocollective.com/kolbruninga instagram: @kolbrunsoring

Curatorial text by Joe Rowley

Raumdeuter is a play on the German Traumdeuter, ‘interpreter of dreams’ and pertains to an interpreter of space.[1] In Raumdeuter Radio the interpreter of space is a selection of audio works, the space interpreted the cityscape of Gothenburg, Sweden. The project leverages the trope of the commuter, headphones-in, engaged in the social contract of avoidance of interaction with and feigned ignorance of the rest of the polis.

The various forms of public transport available in our cities and their attendant infrastructure (train stations, bus stops, concourses, etc.) offer perhaps the last truly public space open to everyone.[2] The interior space of public transport can situate an accountant en route to the office next to a child off to school; an elderly woman born and raised in the city next to a new arrival from another country. They help us to navigate the city, providing reference points as well as ingraining the relationship between different districts within us. They glide through and past sparkling city centres, busy monument squares, post-industrial terrain vague and ordered suburbia, exposing almost every facet of the urban environment. The spaces of transit themselves are often quiet spaces where various strict social norms are observed. These usually relate to preserving personal space and somehow privacy of the traveller. These behaviours have been reinforced by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

In our contemporary cityscapes, many spaces are restricted in terms of accessibility. This can be for a variety of reasons associating to ownership, broader notions of the fencing of the commons[3] and the rise of mixed-use spaces which are simultaneously public and private.[4] Public space is notionally a democratic space, though democracy is an ever more embattled concept in the global political landscape.[5] Whilst it is true public transport often requires a fee, the attendant infrastructure built around the routes offers a public space that is truly public and cosmopolitan.[6] Perhaps these spaces hold the key to reactivating, reinterpreting and re-engaging the city, forming spaces where an inclusive public sphere, more in the mould hoped for by Nancy Frasier[7] amongst others, unwittingly exists.

Raumdeuter Radio aims to take advantage of the aspect of the contemporary commuter to use sound to help reinterpret routes that they may travel every day or encourage them to engage with parts of the city they never visit. Thinking through Henri Lefebvre’s The Right to the City[8] and the work of Rosalyn Deutsche the project aims to both reveal elements of and narratives within the city that can remain hidden or marginalised, guiding the listener to greater awareness of their environment and possible role within it. The project will launch in connection with the 11th edition of the Gothenburg International Biennial of Contemporary Art which will focus both on the history and future of the city.[9] Gothenburg was the base for Swedish colonialism in Africa and the Caribbean, the Swedish East India Company, and is amongst the most segregated cities in Europe.[10] With these factors in mind, Raumdeuter Radio hopes to reveal and celebrate the city and all those within it.

[1] Rice-Coates, C. 2017. Thomas Müller the First and Possibly Last Raumdeuter. The Football Times. [av@: https://thesefootballtimes.co/2017/03/31/thomas-muller-the-first-and-possible-last-ramdeuter/ (02.10.20)]

[2] Tonnelat, S. 2010. “The Sociology of Urban Public Spaces” in Wang, H., Savy, M., and Zhai, G (eds.), Territorial Evolution and Planning Solution: Experiences from China and France. Paris, Atlantis Press.

[3] Self, J. 2016. REAL Foundation. Speaking at the Swiss Architecture Museum [av@: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlqEifJfybg&t=533s (02.10.20)]

[4] Martire, A. 2020. Street Space. [av@: https://www.streetspaceresearch.com/about (02.10.20)]

[5] Deutsche, R. 1998. The Question of “Public Space”. Seminar Transcript [av@: https://iwalewapublicspace.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/rosalyn-deutsche-_-the-question-of-_public-space_.pdf (02.10.20)]

[6] Tonnelat, S. 2010. “The Sociology of Urban Public Spaces” in Wang, H., Savy, M., and Zhai, G (eds.), Territorial Evolution and Planning Solution: Experiences from China and France. Paris, Atlantis Press.

[7] Frasier, N. 1992. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy", in Calhoun, Craig (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, pp. 109–142

[8] Lefebvre, H. 1996. The Right to the City.

[9] Rosendahl, L. 2020. The Ghost Ship and the Sea Change. [av@: http://www.gibca.se/index.php/en/2021/framework (02.10.20)]

[10] Thörn, C., & Thörn, H. 2017. “Swedish Cities now Belong to the Most Segregated in Europe” in Sociologisk Forskning, årgång 54, nr 4, pp. 293–296.

Partners:

Raumdeuter Radio is financially supported by Goteborgs Stad Utvecklingsstöd.
Raumdeuter Radio is proud to be collaborating with several institutions across Västra Götaland:

Boy Konsthall [route: Flyg]
Frölunda Kulturhus [route: 50]
GIBCA Extended
Godisfabriken Konstateljé [route: 9 & 99]
Konsthallen Blå Stället [route: 9]
Landvetter Kulturhus/Härryda Kommun [route: Flyg]
Ljudverket
Urban Konst Göteborg