I Speak Radio

Since 2010, Anna Bromley has been inviting artists, activists and cultural researchers into the radio studio to explore language and voice together, in the context of sound, politics and everyday life. What began as an artists’ radio research format has developed over the years into a series of exhibition pieces focusing on radio and its visible and invisible transmission bodies.

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.