Publishing a selection of her radiophonic essays here for the first time, I Speak Radio reflects Bromley’s collaborative radio practice. The publication also provides insight into the corresponding exhibition formats of these projects, including cooperations with a large number of artists, activists, radio makers and theorists. An index of images and texts on Bromley’s other artistic works is inserted into the book.

I Speak Radio opens with Bromley’s eponymous multimedia essay on the feminist appropriation of early radio technology in the 1920s. A Voice Exists in Voicing, the series of radio essays and sonic portraits with which Bromley opened the Manifesta Radio in Prishtina in the summer of 2022, comprises the core of the book. The accompanying visual element to this section is a series of drawings by Michael Fesca. Contextualizing texts by Catherine Nichols and Hedwig Fijen provide an introduction to A Voice Exists in Voicing. Finally, Bromley talks to media activist Diana McCarty about the politics of persistent radio voices and considers critical perspectives on radio as a medium within art exhibitions.

Complementing the print version, audio excerpts from I Speak Radio and A Voice Exists in Voicing can be heard in the e-book. The e-book includes two additional texts: a conversation between Bromley, Brandon LaBelle and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, and a condensed text form of Red Forest’s “Radiogram #3: The Enchanted Technologies of Transmission”, in which, alongside Anna Bromley, Diana McCarty, Tetsuo Kogawa, Alla Mitrofanova and JD Zazie are featured as important companions and inspirations.

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One of the last large developments to be built in East Berlin was Neu-Hohenschönhausen, with Erich Honecker himself laying the foundation stone in February 1984. Many of the apartment buildings were ready for their new tenants as early as 1987—the high-rise at Zingster Straße 25 counted among these.

Three decades later, the artist Sonya Schönberger inquired what had become of the buildings’ original tenants. Who still lives there? Who has since moved in?

Based on interviews, the stories in this book offer a glimpse into different everyday realities, interconnected through the outer shell of the Platte. They tell, in a very personal way, of daily life in the GDR, of the change of the political systems, and of the present day in reunified Germany.

Leseprobe (pdf):

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On 4 April 2016, around forty people gathered to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Marx-Engels-Forum in Berlin Mitte. Most of them had attended the site’s dedication in 1986—the lived history of a place whose meaning has consistently been denied.

In the 1950s and 60s the site was earmarked for a high-rise tower for the East German government yet this never materialized. Then in 1973 plans were laid—and ultimately realized—for a forum in the form of a public park. After 1989 the park remained unchanged or possibly was even forgotten.

Today, there are two opposing camps: on the one hand those who advocate an exact reconstruction of the city’s ground plan as it looked here in medieval times—almost as if the historicism driving the reconstruction of the palace on the far bank of the Spree has proved contagious; and on the other, the ‘modernists,’ who are committed to preserving and further developing the last vestiges of East German Modernist architecture and urban planning.

Located as it is between the television tower and the future Humboldt Forum, the Marx-Engels-Forum is a place of commemoration par excellence. It has been closed to the public since 2010 owing to work to extend the subway line U5, but is set to enjoy a new lease of life as an urban recreation zone by 2019. This publication illustrates and puts up for debate both the history of the site and the recurrent negotiations regarding its use, including those of 2015 in which the public was invited to participate. How might an open space—since, YES, that’s what is all about—be preserved at a prime downtown location and configured such as to accommodate continually changing uses?

If freedom is to be a feature of the appropriation of the forum then freedom must be inscribed in the very design of this urban public space, from its inception. And what better solution therefore, than to base its development on the physical presence of various sculptural ensembles? After all, the sculptures were there first—and not only those of Marx and Engels!

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Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, local citizens took the initiative and began replanting a section of the former border strip between the districts of Prenzlauer Berg in East Berlin and Wedding in West Berlin.

They thus literally laid the groundwork for a public park whose completion would prove to be a bone of contention for the next twenty-five years—a period in which participatory planning procedures exhausted civic engagement, and social and spatial polarisation became increasingly extreme.

As this detailed reconstruction of the history of Mauerpark illustrates, the site is no isolated example but rather symptomatic of developments in many parts of Berlin and other cities too: for what is at stake here is the reach of representative democracy.

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