Roots & Kulture

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. When active, the Wasteland Twinning Network hijacked the concept of ‘City  Twinning’ and applied 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 then 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.

The project was founded in 2017 by artist Alex Head.