Speak to me by Anna Bromley
Speak to me is a project by artist Anna Bromley, who develops exhibitions, installations, performances, texts, radio talks and pieces.
Through process-based, hybrid methods including recording oral histories, modifying found sounds, reenacting protest speeches retrieved from various archives, Anna Bromley examines representational modes of speaking and talking.
In this project, Bromley looked at radio practices in protest networks. Specifically, she researched the history of a radio amplifier that is part of the collection of the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin. During her residency at Kunstverein Rödershof in 2020, she conducted interviews and explored marginalised radio stories and the associated anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s. From Edition Error (translated):
In the mid-seventies, a radio amplifier from Italy arrives in the region between France, Switzerland and southern Germany. Its electronic veins feed the voices of opponents of nuclear power, protesting farmers, and striking workers. In 1980, it moves to the Free Republic of Wendland. After the evacuation of the occupied anti-nuclear camp, a photographer takes in the wounded ‘radio thing’. Years later, the activist amplifier lies under a glass case in Berlin’s Museum of Technology, now scarred and silenced. Speak to me evokes its history(s) and dreams for the future. In the process, other marginalized radio stories gradually come into the now.
Speak to Me was presented as part of sound.nodes at Bärenzwinger, Berlin, in 2020.
In 2022, the project materialized in a zine/book published by Edition Error. Sibel Beyer provided the graphic design. The publication includes drawings by Michael Fesca and photographs by Sandy Volz. It has 36 pages and was printed in a single color.
The display typeface is the aptly named Signal Compressed (Production Type). This font by Emmanuel Besse is based on a lettering style commonly painted on roads, with the bold letterforms intentionally stretched and deformed so that they are easier to read from the driver’s perspective. Signal Compressed is paired with Tiempos (Klim Type Foundry) and Neue Helvetica (Linotype).
