Discover the episodes of Radio GAMeC 30, the season of the museum’s radio station dedicated to the last 30 years of history.
Starting from the point of view of personalities from the world of art and culture who have lived through the experiences of the last three decades first hand, with the aim of recounting aspects of a complex and changing reality, Radio GAMeC 30 proposes a journey in stages, guided by director Lorenzo Giusti and curator Ilaria Gianni.
(Podcast in English)
1991 – The Birth of the World Wide Web (Episode 1)
Guest: Olia Lialina
Led by Lorenzo Giusti
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The work of Russian artist Olia Lialina (Moscow, 1971) has focused on the web and its implications. A pioneer of net art, an artist and critic of film and new media, Olia Lialina is known for some pivotal experimental works produced in the second half of the 1990s, as well as for having used herself as a model in her experiments with animated GIFs. She has founded one of the first web galleries, Art Teleportacia.
1992 – The Bosnian War (Episode 11)
Guest: Šejla Kamerić
Led by Lorenzo Giusti
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The research of Šejla Kamerić (Sarajevo, 1986) takes up the subjects that arise from non-linear historical narratives and personal histories, focusing on the politics of memory, modes of resistance in human life and idiosyncrasies of women’s struggle. By insisting on empathy as the founding communicative mechanism between herself, her subjects and spectators, Kamerić warns of places of power and simultaneously creates political arenas.
1993 – The Border Wall between Mexico and the United States (Episode 4)
Guest: Héctor Zamora
Led by Lorenzo Giusti
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Héctor Zamora (Mexico City, 1974) is a visual artist. His works transcend conventional exhibition space to reinvent space itself, starting from a series of reversals and contrasts, such as those between public and private, external and internal, organic and inorganic, or even real and imaginary.
In 2020 Zamora received the commission for a sculpture to be temporarily placed on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The work, Lattice Detour is an undulating brick wall, thirty meters long, that many has interpreted in relation to the barrier of separation between Mexico and the United States. For this and other reasons we decided to turn to Héctor Zamora to talk about old and new barriers, the public space and future.
1994 – The End of Apartheid (Episode 12)
Guest: Dineo Seshee Bopape
Led by Lorenzo Giusti
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Dineo Seshee Bopape (Polokwane, 1981) is a South African multimedia artist whose research “engages with powerful socio-political notions of memory, narration and representation”, mixing video montages, sound, found objects, photographs and sculptural installations.
1995 – Valeri Polyakov: The Longest Single Stay in Space (Episode 27)
Guest: Luca Pozzi
Led by Ilaria Gianni
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Luca Pozzi (Milan, 1983) is a visual artist and interdisciplinary mediator. Inspired by the worlds of art, physics, multi-messenger cosmology and computer science, after graduating with a degree in painting and specializing in computer graphics and systems, he collaborates with visionary scientific communities, including Loop Quantum Gravity (PI), Compact Muon Solenoid (CERN) and the Fermi Large Area Telescope (INFN, NASA).
Studying quantum gravity, teleportation, time travel, cosmology and particle physics, the theoretical research is converted in a series of hybrid installations characterized by magnetized sculptures, levitating objects, light drawings, AR / VR cross-reality experiences and a performative use of photography based on a strange feeling of frozen time and multidimensionality. His work has been exhibited in major museums and galleries in Italy and abroad, and his pieces are part of prestigious public and private collections. He is currently collaborating with the INFN on the integration of particle detectors in his artworks, to expand the sensoriality of the human body towards the new frontiers of quantum computing and artificial intelligence.
1996 – The Cloning of Dolly the Sheep (Episode 3)
Guest: Eduardo Kac
Led by Ilaria Gianni
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The Brazilian artist and theorist Eduardo Kac (Rio de Janeiro, 1962) is the founder of “Transgenic Art” – a new art form based on the use of genetic mutation techniques to create unique living beings.
The interventions on the genome allow Kac to reflect on those forces that are able to silently modify the environment and the body we inhabit, such as genetic engineering or biotechnology. His work analyzes communication systems and the potential interactions between the natural and the artificial, reproducing a world similar to ours, within which authentic and genetically modified organisms coexist. The artist proposes a new approach to biodiversity and nature, in which man, like God, is responsible for creation.
1997 – The Handover of Hong Kong (Episode 17)
Guest: Linda Chiu-han Lai
Led by Ilaria Gianni
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Dr Linda Chiu-han Lai (Hong Kong, 1957) is a Hong Kong-based academic, artist, curator and art historian working at the intersections of experimental video art, interactive media and cultural history. As a critical researcher on the History of Everyday Life, her works are historiographic experiments, in which she develops discourses on auto-ethnography, urbanity and popular culture. Themes of her artistic work include Hong Kong cultural identity and gender. With no restriction to artistic mediums, she turns art-making into criticism, history-writing, gaming and voyages of discovery.
1998 – Rwanda: The First Conviction for Genocide (Episode 26)
Guest: Francis Offman
Led by Lorenzo Giusti
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Francis Offman (Butare, 1987) is a Rwandan-born artist based in Bologna. Interested in the stories of the objects and elements he works on within his paintings, he builds underlying narratives at the intersection of human and non-human experiences.
1999 – The Rise of the No-Global Movement (Episode 2)
Guest: Thomas Hirschhorn
Led by Lorenzo Giusti
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Thomas Hirschhorn (Bern, 1957) is one of the leading artists of his generation. Known for his sculptural constructions made from disposable mass-produced artefacts, Hirschhorn brings together references and images gathered from popular media with the work of radical theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Georges Bataille and Antonio Gramsci. His works aim to stimulate the viewer to become aware of his or her own visual baggage and to feel the need for elaborate critical thinking about geopolitical reality and contemporary social conditions.
2000 – The First WorldPride (Episode 14)
Guest: Jacopo Miliani
Led by Ilaria Gianni
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Jacopo Milani (Florence, 1979) is a visual artist. His practice looks at performance as a research methodology in order to observe the connections between language and the body. He is founder of the independent publishing project “Self Pleasure Publishing” whose focus is on sexuality and language. His research has the same structure as his works: broad, fluid and inclusive. Different medias, people, knowledges meet, developing narratives that create and expand an archive of the real.
2001 – The September 11 Attacks (Episode 21)
Guest: Cheryl Dunn
Led by Ilaria Gianni
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Cheryl Dunn is a New York-based photographer and filmmaker. She began working out of a studio in Lower Manhattan in the late 1980s, dedicating her career to documenting city streets and the eclectic souls who frequent them, from graffiti writers and artists to skaters, boxers, bikers, protesters, and other such enigmatic characters.
2002 – The Wall between Israel and Palestine (Episode 9)
Guest: Emily Jacir
Led by Ilaria Gianni
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Emily Jacir (Bethlehem, 1972) lives and works between Rome and Ramallah, in the West Bank. Resorting to different types of media such as video, performance and photography, Jacir gives voice to Palestinian history and memory through archival materials and personal testimonies that effectively illustrate the precarious condition, now normalized, experienced by her people. Personal footage and documents weave a narrative that accounts for the political, social and urban changes of a strip of land gradually confiscated from its inhabitants.
2003 – The Birth of Second Life (Episode 18)
Guest: Jon Rafman
Led by Ilaria Gianni
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Jon Rafman (Montreal, 1981) is a visual artist whose work explores the impact of technology on contemporary consciousness, incorporating the richness of the imagery of virtual worlds to create poetic narratives that critically engage with the present. Using different languages and media, ranging from photography to video, from sculpture to installation, Jon Rafman investigates the increasingly blurred fusion between reality and its simulation in contemporary society through works that blur the boundaries between the material and the virtual. Since the beginning, the artist has focused on the consequences of the use of technology on our perception of reality.
2004 – The Birth of Facebook (Episode 15)
Guest: Amalia Ulman
Led by Lorenzo Giusti
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Amalia Ulman (Buenos Aires, 1989) is an artist and filmmaker based in New York, whose practice includes performances, installations, videos and web-based productions. Her research investigates the relationship between consumerism and identity and the intersection between class and aesthetics.
2006 – The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Episode 19)
Guest: Chiara Bersani
Led by Lorenzo Giusti
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Chiara Bersani (San Rocco al Porto, 1984) is an Italian artist and activist, committed in the field of performing and visual arts.
As an interpreter and as a director/choreographer, she moves through different languages and visions. Her works, presented in international circuits, are born as creations in dialogue with spaces of different nature, aiming at the involvement of the spectator.
2007 – The Saffron Revolution (Episode 22)
Guest: Chaw Ei Thein
Led by Lorenzo Giusti
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Chaw Ei Thein (Rangoon, 1969) is a visual artist and performer currently exiled in the United States. Her research investigates the conflicts of the burmese environment and questions about the processes of identification, embracing a feminist perspective.
Graduated from Rangoon University with a Bachelor of Law degree in 1994, she received artistic recognition from an early age through numerous international art awards, museum and gallery shows, and residencies.
She was awarded a Fellowship in connection with the Asian Cultural Council (ACC) in residence with the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) from 2009 to 2010. Finalist of 2017 Joseph Balestier Award for the Freedom of Art. She also has been nominated as a finalist for the 2021 GOLD Art Prize.
2008 – The Svalbard Global Seed Vault (Episode 13)
Guest: Amy Franceschini
Led by Ilaria Gianni
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Amy Franceschini (Patterson, 1970) is an artist and designer whose work facilitates encounter, exchange and tactile forms of inquiry by calling into question the “certainties” of a given time or place where a work is situated. An overarching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between “humans” and “nature”. Her projects reveal the history and currents of contradictions related to this divide by challenging systems of exchange and the tools we use to “hunt” and “gather”.
In 1995, she founded Futurefarmers, an international group of artists, anthropologists, farmers and architects who work together to propose alternatives to the social, political and environmental organization of space. Futurefarmers use various media to deconstruct systems to visualize and understand their intrinsic logics; food systems, public transportation, education.
2010 – The Arab Spring (Episode 24)
Guest: Marwa Arsanios
Led by Ilaria Gianni
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Marwa Arsanios (Beirut, 1978) is an artist, a filmmaker and a researcher who lives between Berlin and Beirut. She pursues a collaborative and cross-disciplinary research practice and reconsiders the politics of the mid-twentieth century from a contemporary perspective. For several years the artist has been excavating the lost ideals of midcentury Arab society, focusing on gender relations, collectivism, urbanism and industrialization. Her works examine the post-Arab Spring world with historical awareness and sometimes biting irony. Arsanios’s gaze on the past elucidates the misfortunes and the possibilities of the contemporary Arab world and of the world at large.
2011 – The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster (Episode 10)
Guest: Bontaro Dokuyama
Led by Ilaria Gianni
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Bontaro Dokuyama (Fukushima, 1984) is a Tokyo-based artist who employs a wide range of methodologies and approaches in his body of work, including political activism, installations and video. He became an artist after the disaster of March 2011 that deeply impacted him and damaged his hometown of Fukushima, “sensing that everything that had been taught to him was a lie.”
Previously working as an architect, he started his artistic practice under a new name in order to underline the beginning of this new life. His practice engages with places, people, and issues that have been obscured in contemporary Japanese society, revealing the memories and emotions of those who have been left out or forgotten in mainstream historical discourse. His artworks underline how in our unpredictable modern world, anyone could become a victim at any time. Dokuyama has engaged with various controversial political topics including nuclear displacement, “comfort” women, Japan’s colonization of Taiwan, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the Covid-19 pandemic.
2012 – The Russian “March of Millions” (Episode 7)
Guest: Chto Delat
Led by Ilaria Gianni
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The collective Chto Delat (What is to be done?) was founded in early 2003 in Saint Petersburg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism. The name of the group derives from a novel by the Russian writer Nikolay Chernyshevsky, and immediately brings to mind the first socialist worker’s self-organizations in Russia, which Lenin actualized in his own publication, “What is to be done?” (1902).
Chto Delat sees itself as an artistic cell and as a community organizer for a variety of cultural activities intent on politicizing “knowledge production”. The activity of the collective takes responsibility for a post socialist condition and actualization of forgotten and repressed potentiality of the Soviet past.
Working in a wide range of media, from its inception, the collective has been publishing an English-Russian newspaper focused on the urgent issues of Russian cultural politics, in dialogue with the international context.
2013 – Black Lives Matter (Episode 5)
Guest: Kandis Williams
Led by Ilaria Gianni
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Kandis Williams (Baltimore, 1985) is a visual artist whose practice spans collage, sculpture, film, performance, writing, publishing, and curating. She explores and deconstructs critical theory around race, nationalism, authority, and eroticism. Her work examines the body as a site of experience while drawing upon her background in dramaturgy to envision spaces that accommodate the varied biopolitical economies, which inform how form and movement might be read. Williams establishes indices that network parts of the anatomy, regions of Black diaspora, as well as communication and obfuscation, relaying how popular culture and myth are interconnected. The artist is also the founder and editor-at-large of Cassandra Press, an artist-run publishing and educational platform producing lo-fi printed matter, classrooms, projects, artist books, and exhibitions. The platform’s intention is to disseminate ideas, distribute new language, propagate dialogue- centering ethics, aesthetics, femme driven activism, and black scholarship.
2014 – The Cuban Thaw (Episode 25)
Guest: Wilfredo Prieto
Led by Ilaria Gianni
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Wilfredo Prieto (Sancti Spíritus, 1978) is a Cuban born and based artist, whose sculptures and installations function as tools for exploring social and political issues with a poetic sensibility. His work questions the underlying structures of contemporary culture and reflects on consumption and society.
Prieto is profoundly tied to his native country, with which he has maintained a critical but intense relationship. Cuban society has provided the artist with numerous visual and thematic cues for his work, which he then reinterpreted and projected on a vaster horizon: that of the globalized society and its production of goods, symbols and values.
2015 – The Greek Debt Crisis (Episode 8)
Guest: Stefanos Tsivopoulos
Led by Lorenzo Giusti
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Stefanos Tsivopoulos (Prague, 1973) is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker who explores the relationship between reality and representation, factual data and interpretation. His early work focuses on human behavior in relation to power structures and themes of identity and social ties. More recently, he has begun to address issues such as history, narrative, memory preservation and the mediation of reality.
2017 – #MeToo Movement (Episode 16)
Guest: Jaishri Abichandani
Led by Ilaria Gianni
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Note – The topics covered in this episode may hurt the sensitivities of some users.
Art as a vehicle for a personal commitment to social change is at the core of the work of Jaishri Abichandani (Mumbai, 1969).
Whether in the form of creating socially engaged art works, activating communities by creating new spaces for QBIPoC artists, she examines constructions of National, religious and gender identity as markers of cultural significance to reveal how marginalized individuals hold space and
agency within oppressive systems.
As an artist at the forefront of the struggle against social and political inequalities, her practice has contributed to building and historicizing the struggle of minorities and subaltern classes to assert their rights.
2018 – Fridays For Future (Episode 20)
Guests: Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, Lina Lapelytė
Led by Lorenzo Giusti
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Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, Lina Lapelytė is a group of Lithuanian transdisciplinary artists.
The group won the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, with the opera-performance “Sun & Sea”.
2019 – EU Guidelines on Ethics in Artificial Intelligence (Episode 6)
Guest: Lynn Hershman Leeson
Led by Lorenzo Giusti
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Cited as one of the most influential media artists, Lynn Hershman Leeson (Cleveland, 1941) is widely recognized for her innovative work investigating issues as key to the workings of society: the relationship between humans and technology, identity, surveillance, and the use of media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression. Over the last fifty years she has made pioneering contributions to the fields of photography, video, film, performance, bio art, installation, interactive as well as net-based media art and artificial intelligence.
2021 –The Taliban Takeover in Kabul (Episode 23)
Guest: Rahraw Omarzad
Led by Lorenzo Giusti
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Abdul Wasi Rahraw Omarzad (Kabul, 1964) is an artist, writer, and activist now based in Germany. He is a Professor at Kabul University and founder of the CCAA–Center for Contemporary Art Afghanistan in Kabul and the Women’s Center for the Arts, where many of Afghan young female contemporary artists have studied.