Latitude on Air 

Latitude on Air was conceived in June 2020 as an accompanying radio programme for Goethe Institut's online festival LATITUDE on the FMfrequency and online channel of the Berlin radio station reboot.fm. Over four days, experts, artists and activists explored the festival’s themes, embedded in the larger framework of global dialogue on colonial power relations, their consequences and how to overcome them. As a follow-up to this successful cooperation, the idea was born to develop a monthly radio programme together with the Goethe-Institut and the Radionetzwerk Berlin (along with  reboot.fm, cashmere radio, SAVVYZΛΛR and WEAREBORNFREE! Empowerment Radio).

The two-hour programme offers the opportunity to present current topics and discourses in a detailed form in radio format and thus to illuminate the themes of the online magazine Latitude with in-depth radio features. The programme is divided into two parts; a first, approximately half-hour magazine segment offers interview clips, short features and current thematic anchors, while the second segment allows longer programmes for more experimental formats, in which the programme’s main topics can be presented with greater thoroughness and impact.

08.08.2021    Decolonizing Knowledge Production   With Jessika Khazrik, Abhijan Toto and the SAVVYZΛΛR team

How are the binaries embedded in Western notions of "nature" and "culture" diffused? How can knowledge production become a space of mutuality by means of attuning to non-linear scales of vision? 

In this session, we honor the synergies of fluid ecology and ancestral genealogies, grounded in shared and varied forms of relationality. Jessika Khazrik and Abhijan Toto continue their work in complexifying processes of decolonizing knowledge production. In conversation with SAVVYZΛΛR's Kelly Krugman and Kamila Metwaly, they inquire into the ongoing repercussions of colonial legacies on land, resources, medicine, and struggles against power dynamics as part of the racial capitalocene: a term made widely known by Feminist theorist and political scientist Francois Vergès, that expands the understanding of unequal relations  found in the so called “Anthropocene,” which brought into being global warming, and climate change. Here, where voices of the global South and of minorities – primary communities affected by the consequences of this phenomena – have developed an analysis that join race, capitalism, imperialism, and gender’s impacts.

We peer into the problematics of the human-centered "anthropocene" and speak about the transformative potentials of multiplicity, reciprocity, and interspecies-based reasoning: discussing the notions of toxicity and ways of living with the toxic, asking how the connections and disparities of colonial exploitation continue to seep into the present. 

With an introduction in German by Yasmina Lemkuhl of Latitude on Air. 

This session was aired on the 28th of May 2021 as a monthly radio program from Goethe Institut. Latitude on Air streams the last Friday of every month from 11AM to 1PM (CET time) online from their website, with an archive available on Mixcloud. SAVVYZΛΛR is an ongoing collaborator. 

Jessika Khazrik  is an artist, technologist, electronic music producer and writer whose indisciplinary practice ranges from composition to ecotoxicology, machine learning, cryptography, performance, visual art and history of science and music. Khazrik holds BAs in Linguistics and in Theatre from the Lebanese University (LU) and a MS in Art, Culture and Technology from the School of Architecture & Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was awarded the Ada Lovelace Prize. In 2012-13, she was a fellow at Home Workspace Program in Ashkal Alwan, in 2018-19, a fellow at the Digital Earth and in 2020, guest faculty at HfK Bremen and the editor of the International Solidarity Page at the 17teshreen/October17 monthly publication.

Abhijan Toto  is a curator and writer, interested in ecosophy, indisciplinary research, labour and finance, based in Bangkok, Thailand and Seoul, South Korea. In 2018, he co-founded the Forest Curriculum with Pujita Guha, a multi-platform project for research and mutual co-learning around the naturecultures of the forested belts of South and Southeast Asia. He is the Artistic Director of A House In Many Parts, a multi-disciplinary festival in Bangkok, supported by the Goethe-Institut and French Embassy, which he founded in 2020. He is also curator, with Mari Spirito of A Few In Many Places (2021), Seoul, Bangkok, Istanbul, New York, San Juan, Guatemala City, a platform for international collaboration and collective practice, conceived by Protocinema.  He has previously worked with the Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh; Bellas Artes Projects, Manila and Bataan, the Philippines; Council, Paris; and Asia Art Archive. Selected recent exhibitions include  In The Forest, Even The Air Breathes, GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy (2020); Minor Infelicities, Ujeongkuk, Seoul, South Korea (2020); Southern Constellations, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana (2019); The Exhaustion Project: There Is Still Work To Be Done, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2018). He has participated in residencies at Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; HSLU-University of Applied Arts and Sciences, Luzern, Switzerland and guest lectured at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen; the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, and more. He is a contributor to collective research initiatives such as ‘A Glossary of Common Knowledge’, MG+MSUM (2021) and ‘Under the Mango Tree’, the slow institute (2020). He was awarded the 2019 Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi X, at the GAMeC, Bergamo.