Broadcasts S2 Ep2: Embodied Memory

Embodied Memory is the second episode of season two of Storefront: Broadcasts, which will be live on Sunday, September 15 at 1 pm. It explores bodies of water as sites for the coalescence of time and place, where mythology, cultural and ecological narratives, citizenship, belonging, and familial legacies, can be traced and archived.

This season, each episode is anchored by a specific idea or provocation, drawing from essays or projects that we’ll unpack or expand upon through conversations and research. Participants in this episode are grounded by the writing and sound project A Ubiquitous Wetness by artist Zahra Malkani. 

Zahra Malkani reads her text and plays accompanying field recordings that thread together other segments throughout the episode. Dilip da Cuhna talks about The Invention of Rivers in a lecture from 2019 at Harvard GSD. Architect Ola Hassanain and curator Michelle Mlati listen and respond to an oral excerpt of a performance by Ola at The Rijksakademie in The Netherlands last year as part of her project Tell the waters what the clay kept secret. In this performance, she recites a prayer towards water as a reparative act to the ecological emptying witnessed in Gezira, Sudan. Ola and Michelle discuss the role of the “Watcher” that has been entangled with Sufism and other ways of watching liminal waters. Arjuna Neuman presents part of the radio show For Lula, Mississippi, unearthing the ecological unconsciousness, from early blues to Choctaw music and culture, to contemporary pop. He connects Charlie Patton’s High Water Everywhere that describes the great flood of the Mississippi to Beyonce’s Formation. Priyageetha Dia presents the soundscape of her animation work, The Sea is A Blue Memory, and architect and researcher Marina Otero Verzier reads an essay she wrote about her research on Aguas curativas (healing waters) in Northwestern Spain. Lastly, we pay tribute to the late Bill Viola with The Reflecting Pool, 1977–1979.

Dilip da Cunha is an architect and planner based in Philadelphia and Bangalore, and Adjunct Professor at the Columbia GSAPP. He is author with Anuradha Mathur of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (2001); Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (2006); Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (2009); and editor of Design in the Terrain of Water (2014). His most recent book, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent, was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019. The book has received the 2020 ASLA Honor award and the J.B. Jackson Book Prize.

Priyageetha Dia works with time-based media and installation. Her practice braids themes of Southeast Asian labor histories, speculation of the tropics, and ancestral memory meeting machine logics. Through archival and field research, she explores nonlinearity and practices of refusal against dominant narratives. Recent exhibitions include La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2024); Arts House, Melbourne (2024); Diriyah Biennale, Saudi (2024); Frieze Seoul (2023); Singapore Art Museum (2023); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kerala (2022); La Trobe Art Institute, Australia (2022); National Gallery Singapore (2020); and Art Science Museum, Singapore (2019). She was an artist-in-residence at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore in 2022 and the SEA AiR—Studio Residencies at the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands in 2023. She is currently based in The Netherlands.

Ola Hassanain works between Amsterdam and Khartoum. In her practice, through various mediums, she focuses on developing spatial literacy through the idea of ‘space as discourse’. Her work is informed by the cultural, political, and socio-political shifts in Khartoum including her own experiences and her current  family’s diaspora. Since then she has been at the Rijksakademie Residency 2021-2023, BAK fellowship 2017-2018, and teaching in HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, and Sandberg Institute amongst others.

Zahra Malkani is a multidisciplinary artist and Assistant Professor of Practice in communication and design at the Habib University in Karachi. She completed her MA in contemporary art theory at Goldsmiths University of London/UK (2013) and her BA in studio art at Bard College, New York/USA (2009). Her research-based art practice spans multiple media including text, video, and web, and explores the politics of development, infrastructure, and militarism in Pakistan. Together with Shahana Rajani she is the co-founder of Karachi LaJamia, an experimental pedagogical project founded in 2015.

Michelle Mlati is a curator, urbanist, and writer whose practice has been embedded between Brussels, Johannesburg, Madrid, and Nairobi. Her work centers on creating intersections between art and the architectural and urban design practices through an intersectional environmentalist lens. She has guest lectured the series Curating Botanical Collections (2021), part of the Strategies for Art in Times of Change course convened by Dr. Portia Malatjie at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. As a curator, Michelle has worked with various artists in East Africa and in the diaspora continuing independent practice experimenting with The Forest and Desert School, which emerged from Sudan in the 1960s as a school of literature and poetry that influenced artistic practices of multiple generations. 

Arjuna Neuman is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. His  films and installations have been shown internationally. As a writer, Neuman shifts between the bodily, haptic, and affective through to the geopolitical and cosmological. He approaches the essay form through a multiperspectival and mobile approach, in which the text is inherently future-oriented and experimental, becoming the guiding principle for research and production. In collaboration with the philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva, Neuman has created the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4 Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), and Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum (2020), which have been exhibited at major art venues including Centre Pompidou, Whitechapel Gallery, the 56th Biennale di Venezia, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt. In 2023, they presented an ensemble of cinematic pieces at MACBA, and premiered their new film, Ancestral Clouds, Ancestral Claims, at Kunsthalle Wien.

Marina Otero Verzier is an architect and researcher. She leads the ‘Data Mourning’ clinic at Columbia University GSAPP, focusing on the intersection of digital infrastructures and climate catastrophe. In 2022, Otero received Harvard’s Wheelwright Prize for her project on the future of data storage. She collaborated with the DIPC Supercomputing Center to develop alternative data storage models, including the prototype Computational Compost. Otero is the author of En las Profundidades de la Nube (2024), a book on data storage and sovereignty in the AI era. She was Head of the MA Social Design Masters at Design Academy Eindhoven (2020-2023) and Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut (2015-2022), where she led projects on labor, extraction, and mental health. Her curatorial work includes Wet Dreams (2024), Compulsive Desires (2023), and Work, Body, Leisure at the Venice Biennale (2018). Otero has co-edited numerous works, including Automated Landscapes (2023) and Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021), More-than-Human (2020), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), and After Belonging (2016), among others.

Bill Viola (1951-2024) is widely recognized as one of the leading video artists on the international scene. For over 40 years he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, and works for television broadcast. Viola’s video installations—total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound—employ state-of-the-art technologies and are distinguished by their precision and direct simplicity. His single channel videotapes have been broadcast and presented cinematically around the world, while his writings have been published and anthologized for international readers.