Roots and Kulture 

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In 2012 the European Cultural Foundation commissioned the  Wasteland Twinning Network (WTN) to produce a  set of  investigative radio essays into three European urban wastelands. Wasteland Twinning Network hijacks  the  concept of ‘City  Twinning’ and applies it to urban Wastelands  in order to generate  a network for parallel research and action. The commission became  Wasted Common by author, artist, musician and Research  Associate at Nottingham  University, David Bell and Dogged Lands  by artist and researcher Alex Head. 

These intensely worked pieces  that employ  interviews from across Europe, original musical scores  and compositions, set the bar for what would one day become the  sub_ʇxǝʇ project. They also demonstrate the viability of sonic  documentation that is sensitive to precarious environments,  criminalised recreational activity and communities who do not  posses stable legal status. 

 

Part two of Dogged Lands is under-titled  Frustrated Strategies of  Resistance and this has been prescient of the ongoing enclosures  of land, studios, living space and so-called horizontal networks in Berlin 
(as elsewhere) in the past decade. 

As a direct response to  what was at that time an increasingly blurred sphere that began to  merge private, professional and personal ambitions, the sub_ʇxǝʇ  platform sought to create a new form of collaborative, specifically  radio based practice. 

Inspired by the organisational structure of WTN, this new platform  sought to allow for researchers and practitioners to delve deeply  into their subject, working within the predetermined parameters of  the engagement.

In this way the sub_ʇxǝʇ collaborative process is focused and  outcome oriented without, one hopes, precluding ongoing  dialogue. 

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