The following iterations seek to confront a sense of wounding across the Black diaspora by charting fragmented histories and affective registers of inherited photographs from my father’s archive. Gathering material that exposes the fragility between the public and private, this work investigates custodianship, the Black interior, and the metaphors of transmission through radio.

In a fictive program tagged ‘IFM [radio]’, honoring her father’s time as a radio presenter-turned-interpreter, listeners are taken on a sonic journey through a Black Atlantic constellation: a collage of soundscapes, dialogue, and song from the artist's own lived experience. Invited callers tune in from several satellite locations to form channels and waves of resonance in the spirit of call-and-response. Borrowing from The Black Audio Film Collective’s Last Angel of History and adding an element of performance to her role as ‘radio host’, The artist position herself as a ‘data thief’, a time-traveling trickster digging for fragments of history and technology, leaping through space in search of codes to unlock our collective memory. IFM [radio] employs a mode of bricolage, working with ‘leftover’ second-hand materials in a haphazard fashion. 

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Through sensory explorations of memory and retrieval, IFM [radio] comes ‘on air’ in the form of audiovisual installations that restage archival photographs showing her father’s relationship to sound. In these ‘listening booths’, which recognize the ability of radio to activate our imaginaries, the sonic, visual and haptic are in conversation. The materiality of radio within the home versus public space is revisited through site-specific assemblages of collected devices that embrace impermanence by returning to their respective homes when ‘off air’. IFM [radio] attempts to complicate temporal axes between analogue and digital, ephemeral and permanence, then and now, through the broadcasting of latent and embodied collective memory re-encoded in a future archive.