Repatterning is a series of talks about being turned inside out. It is about the experience of being radically upended, the work of dreaming, and the ghosts that travel along the way. Concentric circles rippling outwards from art, crisis, music, sickness, reinvention, mourning, renewal, collapse, and enchantment. Picking through the remnants and imagining what might emerge, as the grains of sand pile upwards, the hope drone swells, the gamelan chimes, and the distant bells peal.
Repatterning is available via RSS, and via Apple or Google, with occasional glimpses on social media.
Repatterning 6/1 · Kate Donovan May 14, 2023
Kate Donovan talks about meteors and interruptions, apples and time, sensing and bubbles, and temporary listening communities.
“I was thinking of the apples as a sound of interruption — something that just happens. So it makes you pay attention to something else in the garden — the more-than-human world. And in terms of radio, I think of the meteor as a figure of interruption. […] When a celestial body meets an atmosphere from a planet it generates ionized trails. That’s what we see as a meteor. […] And it’s possible to send a radio frequency and it would bounce off of these trails. So I think of it as a figure of radio interruption.”
Kate Donovan · Photo by Victoria Tomaschko
Kate Donovan is a Berlin-based artist and researcher working with radio, listening and the more-than-human. She is interested in transmission and interconnectedness, but also disruption and interference. Her research focusses on non-anthropogenic radio, and re-thinking/working dominant radio histories.
Much of her practice is together with others and circles around knowledge exchange and experimentation. She is part of CoLaboRadio (Free Radios Berlin Brandenburg), the Datscha Radio Berlin team, the international feminist group Shortwave Collective and is a co-founder of Radio Otherwise, an artistic research project motivated by the plurality of experiences involved in radio-making in connection to ecological thinking. She is also part of the research group SENSING: the Knowledge of Sensitive Media (Potsdam), with a project on Radio as Relation.
Repatterning 5/1 · Jasmina Al-Qaisi April 23, 2023
Jasmina Al-Qaisi talks about poetic services and backwards walking, waves and utterances, archiving and abandoning, and subwoofers.
“I’m not thinking so much of visual and concrete poetry anymore […] I’m rather thinking about letters, words or objects, shadows. There are different things that could be a possible score; flexible, fluid or a matter of interpretation. It sounds a bit abstract, but it’s not so abstract actually, it’s a decision one takes. Just to give an example of what I mean in saying I’m thinking of writing with my voice.”
Jasmina Al-Qaisi
Jasmina Al-Qaisi is a writer for voice and paper, appearing sometimes in other forms, such as a walking scientist, the schnelle musikalische hilfe service, or as the only agent for the self-entitled-self-entitlement-office. Jasmina is as well listening with her hands and makes waves on free, independent, temporary, mobile radios and public radios writing with sound.
Repatterning 4/1 · Shelley Etkin April 2, 2023
Shelley Etkin talks about landing and healing, digging and dreaming, being in dialogue, and ways to think about gardens.
“How can we learn to include ourselves, to an appropriate degree, so that all the needs can actually start to feed and nourish each other? And that is where a regenerative framework also tries to push the notion of sustainability — keeping something going, maintaining and upkeeping operations — into how we link things together so that they actually serve and nourish each other. Including us. And including in the city, for example. How would it be to move through the city as a garden? What if the city was a garden of gardens?”
Shelley Etkin
Shelley Etkin is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, and gardener, based in Berlin. Her work centers relations between bodies and lands, engaging in process-based ecological thinking, making, and healing.
Repatterning 3/1 · Joy Mariama Smith March 12, 2023
Joy Mariama Smith talks about puzzles and repetition, teaching and shame, noise and colour, and flavours of racism.
“You heard it here first, I’m inventing it. My note says: ‘invent black noise.’ Just so you know.”
Joy Mariama Smith · Photo by Lavinia Pollack
Joy Mariama Smith is a native Philadelphian currently based in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Their work primarily addresses the conundrum of projected identities in various contexts. A sub-theme, or ongoing question, in their work is the consideration of the interplay between the body and its physical environment. Rooted in socially engaged art practice, they are a performance/installation/movement artist, activist, facilitator, curator and architectural designer. They have a strong improvisational practice spanning over twenty years. When they choose to teach, they actively try to uphold inclusive spaces.
Repatterning 2/1 · Wiam El-Tamami February 19, 2023
Wiam El-Tamami talks about revolution and aftermath, disaster as a catalyst, ways of living, mediated truth and literary truth, and lying down.
“There was this assumption that you were totally in this together, just because of being there. You shared the same vision of life, the same dream, the same longing for a different world. That was the illusion of that moment, but also the beauty and magic and reality of that moment.”
Wiam El-Tamami
Wiam El-Tamami is a writer from Egypt.
Wiam writes, translates, edits, teaches yoga, cooks, gives bodywork, talks and listens. Sleeps and wakes and dreams. Moves, a lot. She has been semi-nomadic for the past 18 years, spending time in many places across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and North America.
Her work has been published in Granta, Ploughshares Solos (forthcoming), Social Movement Studies, Freeman’s, Jadaliyya, Alif, and in various anthologies, including Translating Dissent, The Uncanny Reader, and Road Stories. She has just finished writing her first book — a memoir of questions about her time as a volunteer on the Greek island of Lesbos — and is currently working on a second. She is based, for the moment, in Berlin.
Repatterning 1/1 · Wanda Gaimes January 30, 2023
Wanda Gaimes talks about raving and liberation, community and grief, kinship and work, cultural space and housing, and local internationalism.
“Lecken has been explicitly feminist from the beginning — and by that, I don’t just mean in a “femme to the front, women to the front” way, but feminist in the sense of having a politics that goes beyond just inclusion and representation — a politics where we try to constantly trouble the status quo, and educate ourselves further about what the stakes are for personal and collective liberation.”
Wanda Gaimes
Wanda Gaimes is a freelance lecturer, writer, and curator.
Wanda’s interests span socialist theory and praxis, radical feminisms, queer liberation, and underground culture-making. After earning her PhD in Political Science from McMaster University in Canada, she moved to Berlin, where she pursued a post-doctoral fellowship and worked as a lecturer at Humboldt University.
Her work has been published in various social studies journals, including New Left Review and Theory & Event, and her book Volunteer Tourism in the Global South: Giving Back in Neoliberal Times appeared via Routledge in 2015. Since co-founding the queer-feminist club culture collective Lecken in 2016, Wanda has contributed to various stage productions, and performed at HAU, Sophiensaele, and Deutschland Tanzkongress. Wanda DJs under the name Skankstasy and she is the discourse program director for Whole: United Queer Festival.
Repatterning 0 · An Introduction January 9, 2023
Hi. Here is a short introduction to this series. It’s called Repatterning. We are Kata and Tom. We’re intending to release each episode as part of a ‘season’ of around ten interviews at a time. We’ll let you know about the badges.