How can radio open up space for new forms of discourse and artistic practice? In this conversation, three speakers – each closely engaged with radio as part of their artistic and social practice – discuss contemporary forms of the medium. They focus on independent, often online initiatives rooted in specific contexts and communities, and the spaces these platforms generate. While traditional broadcasters have become increasingly bound to fixed formats, smaller online initiatives have emerged as sites for experimentation and liminal spaces for artistic research, critical music, and translocal connection.

Ash Kilmartin shares insights into the programme of Radio WORM (Rotterdam), and Emiddio Vasquez reflects on his experiences with various initiatives and his research on radio culture and infrastructure. Audio excerpts will be shared, and the audience is warmly invited to join the conversation. This talk is moderated by Radna Rumping, who, together with Arif Kornweitz, has run Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee since 2015 as a radio space for curatorial and artistic practices. It forms part of a broader series of reflections on art and radio by Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee this year.

Ash Kilmartin is a radiomaker, visual artist, and writer from Aotearoa New Zealand, based in Rotterdam. She is interested in the speaking voice as a hinge between the physical material of the body and the social fabric of language. She has held residencies at Operator Radio, Rotterdam and Radio Tempo Não Pára, Amsterdam. Since 2021, she has been part of the team behind Radio WORM, currently responsible for programming.

Emiddio Vasquez is a Cypriot-Dominican artist, composer and theorist, whose research is shaped by the politics of matter and how they inform sound and computation. For over a decade he helped shape the Cypriot underground music scene, as an organiser, a DJ, and a performer, and in 2018 he founded the record label Moneda. Along with Peter Eramian he also works as Lower Levant Company, co-representing Cyprus in the 60th Venice Biennale.  

Radna Rumping is a writer, artist, and curator based in Amsterdam. Her work is relational and collaborative, dealing with public space, experimental archiving, ways of gathering, and conditions of (in)visibility. Radio and sonic explorations have run like a thread through her practice. In 2015, she co-founded the artistic radio platform Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee. Her writing is often made public through sound – in the form of audio essays, mixtapes, and live readings.