On Adam Curtis Part Two: With Andrea and Oscar Francke

Matt, Andrea and Oscar discuss episode two of Adam Curtis’ new series ‘I Can’t Get You Out of my Head’.

We talk about the limits of the BBC archive, and the history of the Black Panthers that Curtis never quite gets into. Links to the stuff we mention in this episode are below.

Community Development as Micropolitics by Akwugo Emejulu (publisher’s site) - https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/community-development-as-micropolitics

Errol Morris and Adam Curtis conversation (full text) - https://www.errolmorris.com/content/interview/believer0406.html

On Adam Curtis Part One: with Andrea Francke, Oscar Francke and Ross Jardin

Matt is joined by Ross, Andrea and her son Oscar to discuss the first episode of Adam Curtis’s new TV series ‘Can’t Get You Out of my Head’. We talk about post truth, Curtis’s claim that what he does is journalism, and the affective or emotional tone of Curtis’s films. Below is a list of links to things mentioned in the episode

Tribune Article about Adam Curtis - https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/02/in-defence-of-adam-curtis

New Yorker interview with Curtis - https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-uk/adam-curtis-explains-it-all

NXIVM documentary ‘The Vow’ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vow_(TV_series)

The Civil Contract of Photography by Ariella Azoulay - https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9781890951894/the-civil-contract-of-photography

Lutz Dammbeck - https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0198892/

Ralph Pritchard

Matt speaks to Ralph Pritchard, artist filmmaker, about his ‘Films from the Quar’ series, including his latest films Approval, Flinching and Crushing.

We talk about his work, OCD and uncertainty. And I tell Ralph about a dream I had.

You can watch Approval, Flinching and Crushing at this link - https://ralphpritchard.co.uk/Quarantine-films-S2-only - and see more of Ralph’s work at his website - https://ralphpritchard.co.uk/

Hamish MacPherson and Sophie Mallett

Matt, Hamish and Sophie have a catch up about lockdown, money, art and fatbergs.

Intimacy by Hamish MacPherson

In March and April 2020 Hamish MacPherson used social media to ask, “Are you having sexual or sensual intimacy with people who are distant from you during the COVID-19 lockdowns?”  People replied anonymously and Hamish asked friends and acquaintances to record themselves reading these texts out.  Then Matt turned them into this podcast. It contains some sexual references.

Words: anonymous. Voices: Adam Wilson Holmes, AF, Angela Andrew, Anne-Gaëlle Thiriot, Beth Bramich, Carolin Meyer, Conor James, Elizabeth Rochester, Emilia Robinson, Francisco Zhan, Genevieve Costello, Gillie Kleiman, Gregory Hari, GS,  Hannah Bellil, HMTIDT4U, Joshua Jayraj, Maria Sideri, May, Michael Whitby, Molly Chapman, Molly Martian, Nina Sever, Paul Hughes, Peter Jacobs, Ralph Pritchard, Sean Alayo, Tamara Tomic-Vajagic.

Music/editing: Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau

You can buy a book of the texts with original photographs from stilllifemag.org with profits going to Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement and Covid-19 Prisoner Emergency Fund.

Lars Iyer

Matt speaks to the writer Lars Iyer about his latest book, Nietzsche and the Burbs. They also talk about method, music and what time Lars wakes up in the morning.

M.J. Harding

Matt speaks to the music producer M.J Harding about bangers, intensity, addiction, shame and the voice between speaking and singing.

Joey Holder

Matt speaks to the artist Joey Holder about conspiracies, getting caught in the crossfire of artworld controversy, and the time a clownfish squared up to her.

Richard Whitby

Matt speaks to the artist Richard Whitby about conspiracies, Virginia Woolf and the post-cinematic, and his newest film ‘The Lost Ones’.

Kate Liston

Matt talks to the artist Kate Liston about affects, stances, performance and CrossFit.

Ben Jeans Houghton

Matt talks to artist Ben Jeans Houghton about two of his film works. ‘2ndlife’ (2018), made on a residency in Japan, and a new work in progress, ‘Screaming Bird Singing Dawn Rainbow Mountain’, made at Hongti Arts Centre, Busan, an international collaboration made possible by BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and supported by Arts Council England and Arts Council Korea.

Anne Duffau

Matt speaks to curator Anne Duffau about her peripatetic project A-Z, sci-fi and the power of parties.

Andrea Francke Part 3

The third and last conversation with Andrea Francke. This time we talk about Eve Sedgewick’s writing on paranoia and reparative reading. We talk conspiracy, strong theory, universalism and black feminism.

Andrea Francke Part 2

The second conversation with Andrea Francke. This time we talk about The Idiot, a novel by Elif Bautman, and from that, we talk about female subjectivity in fiction, mumblecore, and privilege.

Andrea Francke Part 1

The first of three podcasts with Andrea Francke where we read different texts and use them to talk about Andrea’s research and interests. For this conversation we both read some Chinese sci-fi (the book is called Invisible Planets) and then talked about care, AI, robots and subjecthood. (You don’t need to have read the stories to enjoy this I promise.)

The Gleaning

The Gleaning is the second in a series of events and artistic responses to James Richard’s Wales in Venice representation at the 2017 Venice Biennale.

For ‘The Gleaning’, the artists Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau and Sophie Mallett present a series of stories and short audio essays highlighting different kinds of gleaning. They explore gleaning as a historical right to subsist on common land, as a creative practice of selection, as mimicry and stealing, and examine examples of gleaning by machines and animals.

Chloe Cooper

Beth Bramich talks to the artist Chloe Cooper about her work with Jenny Moore and Phoebe Davies as Bedfellows, a research project about sex re-education, performing an Internal Scratch at Battersea Arts Centre, sex education at the British Museum, sex positivity, activism and consent.

Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen

Matt talks to Revital and Tuur about their film ‘Trapped in the Dream of the Other’, filmed in a coltan mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Fire by Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau

A performance with sampled sound about Grenfell Tower, resentment and cruelty. Originally given as a performance at ICA London and CCA Derry-Londonderry as part of The Bad Vibes Club’s ‘Feeling Bad’ events in summer 2017. I use ideas and words from Jean Franco’s book Cruel Modernity, Achille Mbembe’s essay Necropolitics and Marina Warner’s essay Back from the Underworld: The Liveliness of the Dead.

Sarah Bayliss

Matt speaks to Sarah about collaboration, dithering and her internet doppelgänger