LIGNA

On the uses of radio in socially engaged artistic practices and the emancipated listener

December 14, 7pm

Showroom, Galerija Nova

On the occasion of the participative performance The Trojan Collective, Torsten Michaelsen, a member of LIGNA collective, will give an artist talk. Through discussion with curators and audience the process of making of this site-specific piece, conceived especially for the shopping mall on Cvjetni Square in Zagreb, will unfold. Previous LIGNA’s work in semi-public spaces will be presented, as well as the specific strategy of using radio in socially engaged and emancipatory artistic practices.

LIGNA on The Trojan Collective:

“Who has the right to define the space of a city? In recent years, the heart of Zagreb has been the scene of various battles in which this question was posed repeatedly. History’s winners didn’t tire of leaving the monuments of their triumphs: they dug holes, built malls and erected expensive apartment buildings. To celebrate this victory, the unstoppable spread of commercialised party zones turns the streets into spaces of spectacle.

Nobody can deny that the architecture of the city presents unmissable facts. But there is no building, no site that can only serve the purpose for which it was built. Therefore, the Trojan Collective offers an exercise in practical architecture criticism. It asks its participants – who can be anybody – to temporarily appropriate a space in the inner city of Zagreb by introducing new movements, gestures and usages into it. By doing so, the Trojan Collective will still remain invisible: like the ancient Greek visitors of Troy, it knows how to disguise itself, how to become invisible under the veil which covered the flaneurs of the 19th century: the masses.”

LIGNA exists since 1997. The group consists of the media- and and performance artists Ole Frahm, Michael Hueners and Torsten Michaelsen, who since the early nineties work at the Freies Sender Kombinat (FSK), a public non-profit radio station in Hamburg. Bi-weekly they provide a program called Lignas Music Box, which asks the listeners to call in and play their favorite songs via the telephone. All works of LIGNA have in common, that they regard their audience as a collective of producers. In a temporary association it can produce unforeseeable, uncontrollable effects that challenge the regulation of a space.