Five Radio Stations #2

Stations by Claude Closky, Jenny Odell, Yuri Suzuki, Isa Toledo and Nico Vascellari are available online : www.fiveradiostations.com

Launched in 2023 with a first series, the project Five Radio Stations —conceived as an online platform—brings together five distinct visions of what a radio station might look like if entrusted to an artist.

Commissioned from visual artists, writers, and composers from diverse geographical backgrounds, the stations differ in both content and form from the podcast-centric spirit that dominates today’s airwaves. Instead, they open windows into the unique worlds of their creators. Here, as on the dedicated online platform, the works are experienced in real-time, without the possibility of pausing the audio. Between silences, natural sounds, and artificial noises, they refocus our listening, allowing us to hear anew the silence or the song of a bird in a distant city.

The 2025 season comprises new commissions from the following five artists, hailing from a wide range of geographical backgrounds: Claude Closky (France), Jenny Odell (USA), Yuri Suzuki (Japan), Isa Toledo (Brazil) and Nico Vascellari (Italy).

As with the first installment, the second season of Five Radio Stations is curated by Seb Emina and Silvia Guerra.

 

Following a proposal by Julien Viteau and Laurent Fiévet, the second season was launched at Passage Molière in Paris on January 18, 2025. The Maison de la Poésie’s small auditorium was home to Claude Closky’s radio station, and its atmospheric library to Isa Toledo’s project. The stations of Nico Vascellari and Yuri Suzuki were broadcast in the two rooms of the EXC bookstore. L’Écritoire, a stationery shop, broadcast Jenny Odell’s station. Lab’Bel would like to warmly thank the management and staff of these establishments for their contribution to the project.

 

Curators’ presentation text

In the 1950s and 1960s, a series of small ships positioned themselves in international waters close to Europe and began to emanate radio signals. Among these original pirate stations were Radio Mercur near Copenhagen, Radio Nord by Stockholm, and Radio Caroline in the North Sea off the English port of Felixstowe. Such nautical enterprises were interested in breaking the entwined shackles of corporate and governmental control so as to play the music they wanted, but their method of doing so had other consequences too. Because didn’t the Rolling Stones’ cover of ‘Not Fade Away’ — the first track broadcast by Radio Caroline — arrive with a salty splash of sea spray, even when heard from a bedroom in London, Paris or Amsterdam? And isn’t this connotation and its subsequent equivalents absent when the record is selected via the bland interfaces of on-demand streaming services? The point being that radio is more than the sum of the sounds it contains.

No sea vessels have been necessary, of course, to transmit the five audio artworks that comprise the second season of Five Radio Stations. The internet and related technologies have long since broken down the old barriers to broadcasting, and redefined what radio means. But somehow the medium has held on to its potential to connect with real places, even as online technology has brought new complications — not least an alienating sense of disembodiment — into play. Those complications, and the ‘real world’ they smooth over, are among the many motifs running through this group of new works by Claude Closky, Jenny Odell, Yuri Suzuki, Isa Toledo, and Nico Vascellari.

Rose Garden Radio, Jenny Odell’s mostly untreated recordings of a Californian rose garden are rooted in her famous desire to remember how to do nothing. Nico Vascellari’s equivalent offer of radio-based teleportation to a town in northern Italy involves the interjections of a traditional bird-call imitator, forcing our point of (aural) view to adopt the language of another species. These projects involve geographical leaps of imagination that remind us to listen more carefully to our own immediate surroundings. To pay attention, in other words.

As Patricia Lockwood once put it, “attention is holy”. The never-repeating political broadcast that is Claude Closky’s Talk-Show assembles rhetoric tailor-made for a hyper mediated world, which, even divorced of its original context, retains an eerily effective ability to seize that attention. The multi-layered monologue of Isa Toledo’s Redescription, meanwhile, ends up unlatching not only her own inner voice but that of an advanced AI chatbot, which it does via a parade of disembodied literary references: a radio of the cyber-fragmented self.

Finally, in Yuri Suzuki’s AI Acid FM, we return to the subject of pirate radio, which, by the time of the rise of acid house at the end of the 1980s, had migrated from the seas to the city. Suzuki’s synthetic, frenetic music station, hosted by a tinny Japanese-speaking bot, is a homage to the pirate stations he listened to in his youth. Generated by AI yet curated by Suzuki so as to precisely recreate the sound of a bygone subculture, it proposes one possible negotiation between the real and the simulated.

These themes — attention, place, rhetoric, simulation — feel more than a little relevant to our current moment. It’s a pleasure to have the opportunity to present these works thanks to this unique programme from Lab’Bel.

By Seb Emina and Silvia Guerra, curators

 

 

THE ARTISTS AND THEIR PROJECTS

Claude Closky
Born in 1963 in Paris (France)
Lives and works in Paris (France)
Through his eclectic body of work, Claude Closky plays with codes and logic systems of all kinds, whether metrical, mathematical, alphabetical or grammatical. From the simplest drawings to video, photography, collage, painting and audio media, as well as publishing and websites, he uses a wide range of means to create discrepancies and distort well-oiled mechanisms.

Talk-Show
[Perpetual, generative radio]
In Talk-Show, five individuals transport the listener into the realm of TV news, where the public personas of political figures are established through the act of delivering certain phrases. Who are these speakers who try to convince listeners with their short sentences and ready-made formulas? By focusing on English, Closky draws on theories from thinkers such as Alastair Pennycook and Jan Blommaert, who examine the language’s status on a global scale—a lingua franca wielded to construct identities and assert power relations.

 

Jenny Odell
Born in 1986 in San Francisco (USA)
Lives and works in Oakland (USA)
Jenny Odell is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work generally involves acts of close observation, whether in the form of birdwatching, collecting screen shots, researching trash, or trying to parse bizarre forms of e-commerce. She is especially interested in frameworks that allow us to perceive something new about everyday reality. She is the author of the books How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019) and Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (2023).

Rose Garden Radio
[Audio loop, 02:59:58]
Rose Garden Radio captures the sonic soundscape of a public park, specifically a rose garden, in all its raw and stripped-down simplicity. There are children laughing, aeroplanes flying overhead, musical instruments playing, even toilets flushing. The station loops through recordings that Odell made during seven days in 2024; occasionally the artist herself interjects with a spoken taxonomy of sounds gathered. The choice of the Morcom Rose Garden in Oakland, California is not insignificant. Its importance to Odell is rooted in a celebrated talk she gave in 2017 entitled ‘How to Do Nothing’, later expanded into the influential book of the same name, published in 2020.

 

Yuri Suzuki
Born in 1980 in Tokyo (Japan)
Lives and works in London and Margate (England)
Yuri Suzuki is a sound artist, designer and electronic musician. His aural and visual works explore human interrelationships, intersecting different aspects of culture and genre and engaging the public in a dynamic social discourse. Openness and inclusivity are key to Suzuki’s practice: to be accessible to the many.

AI Acid FM
[Perpetual, randomized music radio]
AI Acid FM is a fictional streaming radio project where all content is generated by AI. The station streams an endless mix of acid house, acid techno, and rave tracks, seamlessly crafted by Google’s AI music generation model MusicLM. Although the tracks are AI-created, they are carefully curated. Each selection reflects Suzuki’s deep connection to the subcultures and sonic histories that define these genres, transforming raw AI output into something culturally meaningful.

 

Isa Toledo
Born in 1990, in São Paulo (Brazil)
Lives and works in Lisbon (Portugal)
Isa Toledo’s work expresses itself through a variety of media, questioning cinematic images, those of social networks, traditions of all kinds, and the social norms of gender and class perpetuated by the media. She also explores languages, both oral and written, and the tools that shape writing.

Redescription
[Audio loop, 01:19:25]
Redescription is based on 19 notebooks that Isa Toledo kept from 2013 onwards, mostly to store literary quotations but then with occasional personal reflections among them. The artist describes her attempt to use ChatGPT to log and analyse the books’ contents. The line between quote, diary and AI output becomes blurred as Toledo’s spoken-word piece cycles through the work of Virginia Woolf, Thomas Payne, Herodotus, Samuel Beckett, Sēi Shonagon, etc

 

 

Nico Vascellari
Born in 1976 in Vittorio Veneto (Italy)
Lives and works in Rome (Italy)
Nico Vascellari’s research engages with various practices, including performance, sculpture, installation, drawing, video, and sound exploration. Through an anthropological perspective, his works examine the connection between humans and nature, ancient and ritual phenomena, folklore and traditions, weaving them together with an underground aesthetic.

Total Resistance
[Audio loop, 10:09]
Total Resistance makes use of a sort of bird-call imitator known as a chioccolatore and traditionally found his home region in the north of Italy. The artist has explored these uncannily convincing figures before in performances such as Revenge (2018) at MAXXI in Rome. To prepare the station, a chioccolatore was recruited to visit various rather mundane locations in Vittorio Veneto (the post office, supermarket, café, church, etc) where bird calls and ordinary noises merge.

 

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