Monai de Paula Antunes works as an artistic researcher, transmission artist and radio-maker interested in Communication and Complexity together with their material, spatial and political entanglements. Her work engages with the rich materialities and multiple cultural traditions of radio, drawing attention through them to peripheral manifestations of cybernetics and ecology. Presenting itself as infrastructural, her practice decentralises and connects by producing participatory and interactive artworks, but also through the reforming and interweaving of things as an art form. She is one of the four Villa Romana Fellows 2024 and also a doctoral candidate at the Bauhaus University Weimar in the Arts and Design Department.
For the past years, she has directed the project Radio Gardening, compiling several participatory radio experiments accessible through transmission environments and experimental sound mapping. One of its interactions was last installed at the Lantz'scher Skulpturenpark in Düsseldorf, generating a transmission and sound ecosystem that supports a narrative-driven space telling the story of a cybernated radio network that came about in Brazil from the early 1930s until today. In parallel to Radio Gardening, she was awarded th Elsa-Neumann Fellowship for the artistic research Wild Design, which contests hegemonic understandings of design and embraces the contradiction inherent to what wild means today. Informed by brazilian gambiarra and different aspects of creole gardens and quilombola horticulture, Wild Design engages with responsive human-environment relationships tha favor the circumstances over predetermined structures.
By using radio in different ways to set up performative archives and narrative-driven experiences, she tries to restore and reinvent spatial and adventurous qualities to navigation in times of endless scrolling. Moreover, she attempts to contest dominant aesthetics and forms of interactivity present in Media and Computational Art by engaging through low technology with the interconnectedness present in any given environment and between bodies. By doing so, her practice aims to expand perceptions of the environment, more-than-human intelligence and technology. Many of her projects take place in transien platforms, such as the current Spree~Channelsea Radio Group, a project linking rivers in Berlin and London through creative exchanges and public transmissions. Similarly, she is the instigator of the Seed Bunch, a performative seed library namely a seed centered garden that blooms throughout constant encounters in an aesthetic display of freedom entanglement, cooperation and reciprocal domestication.
She is part of Radio Otherwise and the director and founder of Archipel Stations Community Radio. She is also founder and board member of Archipel e.V and Freies Radio Berlin Brandenburg e.V., founding member of Flusser Club e.V., as well as a diligent member of other NGOs engaged with art, education, communication, philosophy and ecology. She is also involved with communication philosophy and archiving, co-editing the Flusseriana: An Intellectual Toolbox - for which she won the prize Deutsche Schönste Bücher 2016 from the Stiftung Buchkunst.
Some places where she has exhibited are: SAVVY Contemporary, Instituto INHOTIM, Floating University, Onassis Stegi, transmediale, CTM Festival, European Media Art Festival, Ars Electronica and others.
She holds BA, MFA and MA degrees in Visual Communication and Arts and Media, specializing in Generative Art and Experimental Spatial Systems, all at the Universität der Künste Berlin. She has lectured at Konstfack, UdK Berlin, Weissensee Kunsthochschule, UNIARTS, Universität Potsdam, and offered workshops in different contexts internationally.
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For the past years, she has directed the project Radio Gardening, compiling several participatory radio experiments accessible through transmission environments and experimental sound mapping. One of its interactions was last installed at the Lantz'scher Skulpturenpark in Düsseldorf, generating a transmission and sound ecosystem that supports a narrative-driven space telling the story of a cybernated radio network that came about in Brazil from the early 1930s until today. In parallel to Radio Gardening, she was awarded th Elsa-Neumann Fellowship for the artistic research Wild Design, which contests hegemonic understandings of design and embraces the contradiction inherent to what wild means today. Informed by brazilian gambiarra and different aspects of creole gardens and quilombola horticulture, Wild Design engages with responsive human-environment relationships tha favor the circumstances over predetermined structures.
By using radio in different ways to set up performative archives and narrative-driven experiences, she tries to restore and reinvent spatial and adventurous qualities to navigation in times of endless scrolling. Moreover, she attempts to contest dominant aesthetics and forms of interactivity present in Media and Computational Art by engaging through low technology with the interconnectedness present in any given environment and between bodies. By doing so, her practice aims to expand perceptions of the environment, more-than-human intelligence and technology. Many of her projects take place in transien platforms, such as the current Spree~Channelsea Radio Group, a project linking rivers in Berlin and London through creative exchanges and public transmissions. Similarly, she is the instigator of the Seed Bunch, a performative seed library namely a seed centered garden that blooms throughout constant encounters in an aesthetic display of freedom entanglement, cooperation and reciprocal domestication.
She is part of Radio Otherwise and the director and founder of Archipel Stations Community Radio. She is also founder and board member of Archipel e.V and Freies Radio Berlin Brandenburg e.V., founding member of Flusser Club e.V., as well as a diligent member of other NGOs engaged with art, education, communication, philosophy and ecology. She is also involved with communication philosophy and archiving, co-editing the Flusseriana: An Intellectual Toolbox - for which she won the prize Deutsche Schönste Bücher 2016 from the Stiftung Buchkunst.
Some places where she has exhibited are: SAVVY Contemporary, Instituto INHOTIM, Floating University, Onassis Stegi, transmediale, CTM Festival, European Media Art Festival, Ars Electronica and others.
She holds BA, MFA and MA degrees in Visual Communication and Arts and Media, specializing in Generative Art and Experimental Spatial Systems, all at the Universität der Künste Berlin. She has lectured at Konstfack, UdK Berlin, Weissensee Kunsthochschule, UNIARTS, Universität Potsdam, and offered workshops in different contexts internationally.
︎ Vimeo
︎ email