performingbordersRADIO: Episode 2 with Diana Damian Martin | May 2023

Tune in to performingbordesRadio, an exploration into the entanglement between Live Art, sound, and notions and lived experiences of intersectional and transnational borders, bi-monthly on Montez Press Radio. In this new show, performingborders take to the radio to share collaborative, sound-based performance work created with and by artists in their network.
In our second episode as Radio residents, we meet with artist Diana Damian Martin to talk through her commission Spells for a border town (retrocedare) which was originally commissioned for the performingborders platform in April 2021. In Romanian, Retrocedare refers to the process of returning something, for example, a territory, back to the person or entity that had previously been ceded (usually) during a violent or enforced take-over. In this episode, we’ll be re-sharing some of the audio work from this commission, re-visiting the political situation of the territories that mark the commission and talking, as well as touching on the entanglement between the process of re-ceding and decolonial practices on the peripheries of Europe.
The episode and commission features work and thinking by artists: Diana Damian Martin, Mihaela Drăgan, Rusanda Curcă, Iulia Mărăcine, and Flo Thamer. 
Diana Damian Martin is an artist and researcher, working at the intersection between writing, politics and performance. Her work concerns alternative critical epistemologies and feminist modes of exchange, interventionist and political performance and the ecological and representational poetics of migration, with a distinct focus on Eastern Europe. Recent collaborations include performingborders, The Albany, Dansehallerne, The Wellcome Collection and Tate Modern. She co-hosts The Department of Feminist Conversations and Something Other, and co-runs the Serbo-Romanian critical cooperative Critical Interruptions, artistic research committee Generative Constraints and is a core member of Migrants in Culture. Her recent publications include (states of) wake: Dedicating Performance and Critical Interruptions Vol 1: Steakhouse LIVE. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Performance Arts at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and once appeared in an issue of Private Eye, where her work was described as obscure, impenetrable and unclear. Twitter: @DianaADamian