Radio Papesse

Anna Ostoya is Anna Ostoya is a Polish artist currently living in London. From next September she will be a participant in the Whitney independent study programme in New York. Her sound piece Saturday Afternoon, 1st of December, Leeds is part of Tobi Maier's Radio Epode radio program in the frame of Adam Budak's exhibition Principle Hope for Manifesta7 in Rovereto. 

Saturday Afternoon, 1st of December, Leeds is a recording of Zygmunt Bauman - Emiritius Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds and at the University of Warsaw - reading the chapter Leonia from Italo Calvino's novel Invisibel Cities. Bauman has used fragments of Invisible Cities in his books Wested Life and Liquid Love, employing Leonia as a metaphor of consumerist society.

Ostoya recorded Bauman's voice and only slightly manipulated it in order to create a second distinct and serious layer to the original quality of the sound. The piece has been broadcast on radio stations (previously once on Resonance 104.4FM in London), as a kind of audio play, but it is also intended to be part of an installation together with furniture-like sculptures. In an intimate situation of timeless interior it is listened to via headphones in Manufattura Tabacchi in Rovereto.

Zygmunt Bauman is author of books about 'heavy' and 'solid', hardware-focused modernity and a 'light' and 'liquid', software-based modernity. 'Liquid times' is a term he introduced to describe post-modern life, which main characteristic is ambivalence and increasing feelings of uncertainty. According to Bauman the product of modernisation deriving from economic progress and order building is human waste: a superfluous, unusable being, a redundant human, such us an unemployed person or a refugee. His favourite authors are Robert Musil, George Perec, Jorge Luise Borges and Italo Calvino. In 'Wested Life' and 'Liquid Love' he uses fragments of Italo Calvino's book Invisible Cities as a references and a metaphor for his theories.

Italo Calvino was an Italian writer and a journalist. Invisible Cities, published in Italy in 1972 is a novel containing descriptions of fifty-five cities, which are told by the main character Marco Polo, the young Venetian traveller to Kublei Khan, the old Tartars' emperor. Khan is curious to hear about the places he owns, but has never visited and to engage himself in philosophical conversations with his visitor. The cities in Marco's narration are not real places, but they contain features of urban life and organization, which though taking different forms in different places and epochs, seem universal.