MOSTYN presents Local 37, a three-part radio series developed in collaboration with LUMIN, an artist-run radio and publisher led by Sadia Pineda Hameed and Beau W Beakhouse.
The radio series will be broadcast weekly on 7th, 14th and 21st December 2020 at 6pm GMT and will be hosted here on MOSTYN’s website. The series includes contributions by Gantala Press, Jade Montserrat, Hanan Issa invited to respond by the Welsh Arts Anti Racist Union (WAARU), Josèfa Ntjam and Isola Tong.
The third show (21st December) with Josèfa Ntjam and Isola Tong, imagines futures of resistance and existence.
The second show (14th December) reflects on recent actions towards equity in the arts with Jade Montserrat, and Hanan Issa invited to respond by the Welsh Arts Anti Racist Union. The show also includes contributions by PCS Tate United, IWW Cymru, Valleys Underground, and Adam Johannes / People's Assembly
The first show (7th December), with Gantala Press responds to the role of the artist in local and migrant Filipino labour movements:
Content warning: reference to domestic abuse - 11:30 to 14:54
Local 37 is a fictional underground radio station transmitting dialogue and strategies for the artist as worker. Inspired by the Filipino Labour Union founded in the US in 1933, later called ‘Local 37’, and Carlos Bulosan’s short text ‘The Writer as Worker’, this radio series inhabits the intersections of creation, transmission, and anti-colonial and working-class collectivisation. Local 37 is a manifesto for the artist, building ‘a world of mutual cooperation, mutual protection, mutual love.’
“But always art is in the hands of the dominant class— which wields its power to perpetuate its supremacy and existence. Since any social system is forced to change to another by concrete economic forces, its art changes also to be recharged, reshaped, and revitalized by the new conditions. Thus, if the writer has any significance, they should write about the world in which they live: interpret their time and envision the future through their knowledge of historical reality.”
Carlos Bulosan, ‘The Writer as Worker’, 1955
LUMIN is a Cardiff-based small press, curatorial collective and radio programme for experimental, radical and personal literature and art led by Sadia Pineda Hameed and Beau W Beakhouse. Taking inspiration from underground radio, LUMIN RADIO is a DIY show distributing radical sounds from the past and present.
Sadia Pineda Hameed is an artist, writer and independent curator based in Cardiff. She works in film, installation, text and performance to explore collective and inherited trauma; in particular, the latent ways we speak about this through dreaming, telepathic communion and secrets as an anti-colonial strategy inherent to us. She is co-founder of LUMIN. She has shown work with Artes Mundi, National Museum Wales, g39 WARP, Arcade Cardiff, SHIFT, Gentle/Radical, the Eisteddfod, HOAX, and forthcoming with Bluecoat and Arcade/Campfa. She also has a collaborative practice with Beau W Beakhouse.
Beau W Beakhouse is a poet, filmmaker and curator based in Cardiff. His artistic practice returns to themes of language, land, the post-colonial, alternate histories and dreams. He is preoccupied with ideas of convergence and multiplicity, as well as enforced divisions between human/non-human, city/nature. He is co-founder of LUMIN. He has had residencies with Madein Roath, Arcade, SHIFT and recently with Peak Cymru, creating a series of moving image works. He has also been co-developing a multi-disciplinary project funded by Arts Council of Wales looking at digital archives and post-colonial history through woodcraft, artist film and installation.
GANTALA PRESS (gantalapress.org) is an independent, non-profit, volunteer-run Filipina feminist small press and literary collective based in Metro Manila, Philippines, founded in 2015. The press centres women’s stories and issues in their projects: anthologies, chapbooks, cookbooks, comics and zines that are written by women, including peasant and working-class women – produced with other collectives and people’s organisations, and supporting communities in the margins. Among their works are: MAKISAWSAW: Recipes x Ideas, produced in solidarity with, and to raise bail funds for, arrested workers of Nutriasia Food Corp.; KUMUSTA KAYO? Naratibo ng Kababaihan sa Kanayunan sa Pandemya, a collection of writings by peasant women in the time of COVID-19; and PA-LIWANAG: Writings by Filipinas in Translation, published by Tilted Axis Press. Gantala Press also holds educational discussions and writing activities with peasant and urban poor women, and cultural events that discuss women, food security and sociopolitical issues.
Jade Montserrat is the recipient of the Stuart Hall Foundation Scholarship which supports her PhD (via MPhil) at IBAR, UCLan (Race and Representation in Northern Britain in the context of the Black Atlantic: A Creative Practice Project) and the development of her work from her black diasporic perspective in the North of England. She was also awarded one of two Jerwood Student Drawing Prizes in 2017 for No Need for Clothing, a documentary photograph of a drawing installation at Cooper Gallery DJCAD by Jacquetta Clark. Jade’s Rainbow Tribe project – a combination of historical and contemporary manifestations of Black Culture from the perspective of the Black Diaspora is central to the ways she is producing a body of work, including No Need For Clothing and its iterations, as well as her performance work Revue. Jade was commissioned to present Revue as a 24-hour live performance at SPILL Festival of Performance, October 2018, a solo exhibition at The Bluecoat, Liverpool (Nov – 10 Mar 2019), which toured to Humber Street Gallery (July – Sept 2019) and was commissioned by Art on the Underground to create the 2018 Winter Night Tube cover. Iniva and Manchester Art Gallery have commissioned Jade as the first artist for the Future Collect project (2020).
The Welsh Arts Anti Racist Union (WAARU) is an artist and art worker led anti-racist collective of black and non-black womxn of colour, working towards removing economic, cultural and racial barriers that face Black and non-Black people of colour in Wales. WAARU seeks to dismantle systemic injustice in the sector and its institutions, imagining and demanding an equitable reality for us all.
Hanan Issa is a writer, poet and artist from Wales. Her debut pamphlet ‘My Body Can House Two Hearts’ was published by Burning Eye Books. Her work has been performed and published in places such as BBC Wales, ITV Wales, Huffington Post, StAnza festival and Poetry Wales. Her winning monologue was performed at the Bush Theatre in 2018. She is the co-editor of ‘Just So You Know: Essays of Experience’ published by Parthian Books. Hanan took part in the 2019 Channel 4 writersroom for hit comedy show ‘Lady Parts’. She is the co-founder of the Where I’m Coming From open mic collective. She is currently working on short film commissions: one is an animated short for BBC New Creatives; another is with National Dance Company Wales and is a collaborative dance poetry film. She is a recipient of the 2020 Ffolio - Ffilm Cymru / BBC Wales short film commission.
Isola Tong (b. 1987, Manila) is a transwoman architect and visual artist, currently practicing in Manila. Her work investigates the nexus of relationships between gender, ecology, power and ethnology. The vernacular rootedness of her practice challenges the western hegemony and globalisation of visual culture in search of post-colonial articulations. Her work, which spans a variety of media, portrays a divergence from anthropocentrism in favour of interconnected agencies. She graduated cum laude at the University of Santo Tomas with a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture. She also studied and worked in Osaka, Japan for four years. She has shown and performed in Korea, Slovenia, Serbia and the UK. She currently teaches architectural design, theory and history at the De La Salle - College of Saint Benilde School of Design and the Arts in Manila.
Josèfa Ntjam was born in 1992 in Metz, France, and currently lives and works in Saint-Étienne, France. She is an artist, performer and writer working across film, photomontage, sculpture, installation and sound. She studied in Amiens and Dakar (Cheikh Anta Diop University) and graduated from l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Bourges (FR) and Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Paris-Cergy (FR). Her first solo exhibition at NICOLETTI will be taking place in June–July 2021. Her work and performances have been shown in international exhibitions, including Anticorps, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020); Paysage alentour, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); Risquons-tout, WIELS, Brussels (2020); Climate Knowledges, MAMA, Rotterdam (2020); 15th Biennale de Lyon, MAC Lyon, Lyon (2019); Feminism, Gender, Resistance – Act 3, Arnolfini, Bristol (2019); and Allegoria, duo Show with Kaeto Sweeney, Hordaland Art Center, Bergen, Norway (2019). Upcoming exhibitions include EUROPA, Oxalá, Africamuseum, Tervuren, BE; Mucem, Marseille, and Centro Internacional das Artes José de Guimarães, Guimarães, PT (2021); MEMORIA: récits d’une autre histoire, Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA, Bordeaux, FR (2021), and Drift: Art and Dark Matter, residency and exhibition at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario, CA (in collaboration with the Arthur B. McDonald Canadian Astroparticle Physics Research Institute and SNOLAB).
This project was made possible through funding from the Arts Council of Wales’s National Lottery Fund.
