Tentative Transmits: The Radio as G/Host in the “former East”

Marianna Feher & Olivia Berkowicz

Tentative Transmits is a discursive radio platform that investigates memory, solidarity practices and anti-fascist struggles in Central and Eastern Europe. The project attempts to reclaim lost sites, spaces and narratives by transposing notions around the “former East”.  The research explores archival findings on the Eastern bloc’s transnational and transcultural phenomena to reflect on post-socialist transitions a pluriversal sites of knowledge production.

Following the cultural theorist Svetlana Boym, we depart from the term “off-modern”, that engages with the practice of double estrangement. Instead of teleologies of “post”, “neo”, “trans”, the off-modern follows the lateral move, the zigzag in cultural evolution. According to Boym, the off-modern is a detour into the “unexplored potentials of the modern project. It recovers unforeseen pasts and ventures into the side alleys of modern history at the margins of error of major philosophical, economic, and technological narratives of modernization and progress”. Boym argues that the off-modern has “a quality of improvisation, of a conjecture that does not distort the facts but explores their echoes, residues, implications, shadows”. By departing from these notions, our research topic revolves around how solidarity combines estrangement and engagement, suggesting interdependency without the loss of singularities and multiplicities. Through concepts such as hauntology and post-memory we seek to put the relationship of archive and memory into question.

Our research explores the possibilities of live radio production as well as public gatherings in which to discuss and disseminate knowledge. These sessions inhabit different sites (online/offline, digital/analog) to better understand how each context affects the content. Grounding our common practice in historical precedents, the research project investigates radio archives as well as using radio as an exhibitionary framework. Tentative Transmits seeks to investigate possible ways to write across media, authorships and readerships, and let the production constitute dialogues from within the practice itself. Voices and experiences are intersected and contextualized, while self-reflecting on the production at large by interlinking practices and contexts, subjects and histories. The project seeks to align with the need for shared public places, where we regard the radio program as a space for various practices, authored and listened to by the many.

Previous gatherings by Tentative Transmits  have included interventions by Škart collective, Sanja Horvatinčić and Larisa Crunțeanu, exploring notions of radical amateurism, critical heritage, on micro- and macro-political self-organization, collective practices, artistic experiments and thinking alternative realities beyond simplistic divisions of centers and peripheries. By dissolving boundaries between theory and practice, arts and politics, as well as art and criticism, we insist on practices, its scores, traces and shared knowledge. Thus, we situate our project at the intersection of space, temporality and bodies. From this position, we research how to (un)learn collectively, locating politics of error, envisioning new forms of knowledge and public practice.︎