Future Artefacts FM host artist Monya Riachi, as part of their New Weird Mini-series. Riachi will perform live, debuting a new text work alongside her research unfolding the processes of map making, and their relationships to borders and power as imperial constructions.
The event will be followed by a conversation led by Future Artefacts hosts Nina, Rebecca and Niamh, exploring Riachi’s reflections on fiction, worldbuilding through materials and the use of theatrics to make strange the legacies of empire inherited by our present. What kinds of anarchy, activism or ‘being the other’ might create an emancipatory place to build new worlds from? Who gets to make worlds, what kinds of worlds are they, and who do they serve?
For their second mini-series Future Artefacts will be exploring what weird means. Inspired by the New Weird, Future Artefacts consider what kinds of technologies, ecologies and disciplines can be explored through this sentiment. The series looks to locate the slippage between where something becomes weird or familiar, for example, the inclusion of generated images in news articles.
Future Artefacts are interested in works that challenge the flatness of science fiction and expand notions of storytelling. Some examples of how this flatness can be challenged are; ways the uncanny can be used as a tool for repositioning; deteriorating notions of “good” and “evil” into amorphic forces; or interrogating different dimensions as multiplanar realities.
Monya Riachi is a Lebanese artist and architect. Her practice is material driven and research-led, and is realized through installation, sculpture, moving image, performance and writing. Her work centres matter as a site of narrative and archive, and engages with themes around loss, ecological transformation, the politics of land and time, and the entanglement of histories of her home and adopted countries Lebanon and Britain. . Her research draws on feminist new materialist philosophy and quantum entanglement theory to disclose how matter is generative in creating new matter and new worlds.Monya is based in London and works between the United Kingdom and Lebanon. She holds an MFA from Glasgow School of Art, and is the recipient of the 2024 Lewisham Arthouse Graduate Award. Her work has been shown in London, Beirut and Glasgow. Previous residencies include ‘Material Futures’ at Cove Park, ‘Neither at Land Nor at Sea’ with Cittadellarte, and Ashkal Alwan in Beirut.
Future Artefacts FM is a bi-monthly talk show hosted by Nina Davies, Niamh Schmidtke and Rebecca Edwards, featuring speculative fiction audio works such as radio plays, short stories, fictional interviews and podcasts.
Nina Davies is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in London. Using moving image, sound, text and fiction her practice aims to further critical discussion around dance by observing how it intersects with language and where it begins to take on commodified or material forms.
Rebecca Edwards is a London based curator, writer and producer. Her interests include cultivating experimental curatorial methods, interweaving fluid approaches to production, dissemination and representation of artwork, and exploring the nested fields of technology, digital aesthetics and internet culture.
Niamh Schmidtke explores the politics of green washing, demonstrating the connections between environmental and social justice and drawing attention to the financial and colonial origins of climate crises. Their work is informed by collaboration, working with sound designers, mineralogists, actors or mutual learning with students.
