Jasmina Založnik
radioCona (www.cona.si/radio) is a temporary radio station project for contemporary art, or an art project inhabiting public space– more specifically, a public radio frequency, FM 88.8, and the Internet on live stream. Archives of events and podcasts are available on the project website.
radioCona was founded by Slovenian artists Brane Zorman and Irena Pivka in 2008. The producer of the platform is Cona – institute for processing contemporary art. radioCona works with various co-producers (Moderna galerija, Ana Monro, RAM Live, Mestna galerija, Galerija Škuc, Intima, Zavod K6/4, Maska, Trajekt, Ljudmila) on individual projects. A project partner is the OE transmitters and transformer networks of RTV Slovenia.
radioCona addresses the issue of Cona/the Zone by questioning or problemising the term itself, similar to the way Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky did in his film The Stalker. In the film, the Zone is a “forbidden” area, a previously open public space that the government has “marked” and removed, which clearly refers to a prevalent occurrence in contemporary society – the deliberate diminishing and appropriation of, and increasingly subtle and strict control over, public space. Taking the above as its point of departure, radioCona endeavours to create a new Zone, to reintroduce, create, disseminate and distribute the narratives of various artistic and social communities following Kant’s principle of always confronting the existing social reality; or, taking Debord’s critique of capitalism as its point of departure, to create the necessary conditions for resistance against interpolation of the individuum in the passive consumer/the urban and social fellow traveller.
With its broad horizon and project work, radioCona creates a platform that inhabits, following the example of the locative media, particular Zones in response to current social issues, thus enabling new ways for understanding the concept of society with a clear vision: to establish a critical distance to and encourage reflection on the appropriate use and understanding/translating of public, artistic, communication, migrations, (psycho) geography, the significance of architecture, mapping, recording, the notions of micro- and macro-migrations and their politics, the rights of the individual and the rights of the community in relation to the (concept of) authorship and copyright, cultural politics and production, the concept of knowledge as a public good, and the like.
The particular projects develop Cona as a contemporary platform for exploring, exhibiting, archiving, recording and intervening, or give it the status of a production house looking for and testing out new ways of production and new models of thinking and playing with the possibilities offered by radiophonic space and streaming media.
written by: Jasmina Založnik
Debord, Guy: Družba spektakla. Ljubljana: ŠOU, Študentska založba, 1999.
See also: http://www.cona.si/radio
http://www.cona.si
