Embodied through words, sounds and voice “From My Window: Dreams, Hopes and Disappointments” is a sound collage that explores field recordings taken from the windowsills in my house, escapes from New York City and reflections on what it means to dream through chaos.

Rena Anakwe is an interdisciplinary artist and performer working primarily with sound, visuals, and scent. Exploring intersections between traditional healing practices, spirituality and performance, she creates works focused on sensory-based, experiential interactions using creative technology. 

Currently, Rena is a 2020–21 resident of the Abrons Arts Center AIRspace performance program. She was also a 2019 ISSUE Project Room artist-in-residence, a 2019 Abrons Arts Center Sound Series commissioned artist, and a 2018 Signal Culture artist-in-residence. She has collaborated, produced, and shown work at New York City institutions including: Dia Foundation, Fridman Gallery, Knockdown Center, Lincoln Center, MoMA PS1, CultureHub, Pioneer Works, and Montez Press Radio. Most recently, under the moniker A Space for Sound, Anakwe released the first in an ongoing audio series titled “Sound Bath Mixtape vol. 1”, through the New York City-based label and collective PTP. 

Rena is based in Brooklyn, New York, by way of Nigeria and Canada.

www.aspaceforsound.com

Rena Anakwe - From My Window Hopes Dreams And Disappointments

Mobile Radio residency - Glasgow Calling Scale live with Elina Bry
At the CCA Glasgow, Creative Lab
Performed on 15 February 2022 for Radiophrenia 2022

In collaboration with Radiophrenia and the Goethe Institut Glasgow ‘Mobile Radiophrenia’ is a cultural exchange and radio residency that will result in five new live broadcast works. The artist duo Mobile Radio (Sarah Washington & Knut Aufermann) from Ürzig in Germany have been invited over to work with five Glasgow based artists or artist duos on an intensive daily collaboration that culminates in a live radio performance.

Mobile Radiophrenia Residency - Collaboration with Mobile Radio

Audio Archaeology Series Volume 3: Brest

Sheet Erosion is the third episode in a series of works based around ideas of audio archaeology and found sounds. The setting this time is the city of Brest in France.

The piece is comprised of field recordings made in early 2020 during the storms Ciara and Desmond plus a batch of found open-reel tape recordings dating from the 70s and 80s. The tapes include domestic home recordings but mostly document the recordist, Michel’s tastes in music and radio programmes of the time. Daily life bleeds into these lo-fi recordings of radio and TV shows. Captured with a mic in front of a speaker rather than directly cabled, ambiguous activities can be heard in the background; babies crying, feedback, chairs scraping and muffled conversations.

In the composition family histories and musical tastes are transposed over a more contemporary soundscape of Brest. Over-saturated tape distorts time as well as sounds. Speeds change. Chronologies become confused. Different instances in time are blended and fused. What seeps through these chronological crevices are events and incidents unmoored from linear time taking place in a chimerical non-space.

Empire Of Dampness

Renditions Of The Beat - A Resuscitation Recital

Manja Ristić/Joana Guerra/Verónica Cerrotta, Slani pejzaži

Second Sketch for Larry Shipping - live at CCA< Glasgow, as part of Radiophrenia, 5 September 2016. Starring Tam Dean Burn (voice) with  Ed Baxter (text, direction, electronics), Peter Lanceley (electric guitar, voice, melodies), Kim Moore (viola) and Milo Thesiger-Meacham (electronics). 

Second Sketch For Larry Shipping

A Hörspiel triptych of psychic melodrama, set in a London both past and present:

1. Greenwich Aggregates - 2. The Three Compasses - 3. A Blackened Emirates.

Disparate narratives coalesce in a trail of crime and misdirection stretching across the city, leading us ever closer to an unknowable truth. Everything connects, nothing is reconciled. “Only now & then, something would make me remember…”

Musical interludes courtesy of Bernard Herrmann’s Concerto Macabre.

Debuted on Radiophrenia 87.9 FM (Glasgow) - 29/08/16


Hörspiel

A London Noir

A riotous mash-up of endings, goodbyes and farewells… that refuses to be silenced.

Produced for Soundproof (ABC Radio National, Australia) and Radiophrenia (Glasgow) 2017

The End

Voice-over: Victoria Chen Wei

Narrative sound work, focusing on how the body, the mind, and technology become entangled within inter/intra-personal relationships. The piece is inspired by interviews with my brother regarding his use of GECI viruses to map neural networks, the parallels of working within a hermetic studio and laboratory, and the possibility of slipping into the voices in one’s head. The narration leads the audience through nine hallucinatory episodes within which the narrator slips in and out of consciousness, losing the ability to distinguish inside from outside, body from space, and itself from the ‘you’ it is addressing. By playing with the desire to become-with another, the machine and space, the work addresses notions of personal agency.

Aired as part of Radiophrenia 2017, Radio Space Borealis (Bergen 2018) and Wave Farm (London 2019)

eeeeeeeee Excerpt

Welcome to the first episode of our new podcast series. 

Across this series, Gareth K Vile (Theatre Editor of The List Magazine. He also blogs wild critical theory) will chat to some of the amazing people who make, produce and contribute to our programme; from artists, curators and programmers, to community organisers and social clubs. We'll take a deep dive into exhibitions, gigs, performances and events - exploring the ideas and ethos that underpin our approach to Open Source Programming and how you can get involved. 

In this episode, we hear from CCA Director Francis Mckee; exhibiting artist Shadi Habib Allah; Take Me Somewhere producer LJ Findlay-Walsh; the 'Torvill and Dean of the avant-garde', Radiophrenia producers Mark Vernon & Barry Burns; and Glasgow-based Mexican artist, Catalina Barroso-Luque.

Francis Mckee - (50s) 
*Music* - Otoboke Beaver | *Suki Suki Darling* (14m 03s)
LJ Findlay-Walsh - (16m 48s)
Shadi Habib Allah - (24m 08s)
Mark Vernon & Barry Burns - (37m - 13s)
*Sound* - Radiophrenia excerpt -  (42m 20s)
Catalina Barroso-Luque - (49m 55s)

Thanks to everyone who participated in this show and to Unclassed Media & Sunny Govan Community Radio.

CCA Podcast #1|Francis Mckee/Shadi Habib Allah/Take Me Somewhere/Radiophrenia/Catalina Barroso-Luque

Radiophrenia is a temporary art radio station – an exploration into current trends in sound and transmission arts. Broadcasting live from Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, the station aims to promote radio as an art form, encouraging challenging and radical new approaches to the medium. The broadcast schedule will include live shows, pre-recorded features and a series of ‘live-to-air’performances. The majority of the programme will be made up from selections submitted to an international open call for sound and radio works.

Broadcasting across Glasgow on 87.9fm, and online at www.radiophrenia.scot 

Supported by Creative Scotland.

Rena Anakwe - From My Window Hopes Dreams And Disappointments

Radiophrenia

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