350,000 Leaks by Aram Lee

REPAIR LAB | 5 JULY 2024 | 15:30-16:10 | LIVE RADIO

As part of the research project Pressing Matter, we are pleased to present the Repair Lab "350,000 Leaks" by Aram Lee. The Repair Lab takes the form of a live radio broadcast, operated by online radio Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee. As Pressing Matter artist-in-residence, Lee has been working with the Wereldmuseum collections since December 2022 to create new work to reimagine different froms of return, repair, and reconciliation.

Listen to the recording of the broadcast here

The Repair Lab “350,000 Leaks” will launch a temporary installation of a live radio broadcast from inside the museum depot’s freezer. The institutional ecology, the extremely controlled, secured and sealed site will leak. Restricted spaces within the museum that form the institutional climate of objects, such as freezers, climate control rooms, depots, and water pipes, will have a voice on live radio.

The project is inspired by Masachi Adao's Fukerion (landscape) theory of Japanese radical cinema of 1968, which explains that the power state is located in the scenery of ordinary daily life. The soundscape of "350,000 Leaks" will allow the listener to follow the route in the depots and freezer of the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam. We will listen to sceneries that objects in the depot hear and release them from the temperature dissonance between their original and current landscapes through sounds. The session will uncover invisible institutional power structures and associated rhetorics of temperature to extend them to sensually recognizable political ones.

During this live soundscape, the motif of movement, the audience will remotely participate in this walk through sounds and deep listening in site-specific locations, the immortal device, while the session is held onsite in minus 20-25 degrees Celsius. It will create an open space, where we can have temporary moments of belonging to the space and its histories, and ask how a hegemonic climate identity has been established through uprooted bodies and what kinds of temperature we can set up in between us.

Listen to the recording of the broadcast here

Aram Lee

Aram Lee is an artist based in Netherlands. Her practice revolves around re-mediating materials found within institutions, often seeking to relocate their role and purpose through performative events, film and video installations. She is a former resident of Jan Van Eyck Academie, the Goethe Institute Marseille, guest resident [Pressing Matter] at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten. Her works have been exhibited in venues including Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Biennale de Dakar, Wereldmuseum Amsterdam, De Appel, Framer Framed, Museum de Fundatie, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Oregon Center for Contemporary Art, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Bienal de Arte Textil Contemporânea. Recent artists books include From Pluto to Pyongyang and back and Post Ghost Bust. She is a co-founder of When Site Lost the Plot, working with the site as a fiction preceded by plots going beyond it.

Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee

Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee is a radio space for curatorial and artistic practices. Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee hosts and produces radio shows and podcasts, by and with artists and designers. With a mobile studio, the radio travels to academies, biennials and museums. The radio also commissions sound and performance pieces, related to the research strands of their annual programmes.

About Pressing Matter

Pressing Matter investigates the potentialities of ‘colonial objects’ to support societal reconciliation with the colonial past and its afterlives, and to deal with conflicting claims by different stakeholders for these objects within museums. The project will connect fundamental theories of valuation and property to postcolonial debates on heritage to these societal debates and aims to develop and test, first, new theoretical models of value and ownership and, second, new forms of return that address but move beyond current approaches to heritage restitution, while developing a theory of object potentialities grounded in the entangled, multipolar histories in which colonial objects were collected, kept and made meaningful.