This fall and winter, Phoenix, Arizona indigenous artist collective Radio Healer will introduce an immersive performance on the back patio of Pueblo Grande Museum that uses tools, regalia, video, and sound to perform artworks that make the everyday familiar seem strange. Supported by a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and building on over 10 years of exploration, the collective has combined technology, cultural practices, critical thinking, and community outreach into a singular experience.
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Radio Healer is a Phoenix, Arizona Native American and Xicano artist collective in consisting of Edgar Cardenas, Raven Kemp, Fernando Lino, Cristóbal Martínez, Meredith Martinez, and Randy Kemp. As a group, these hacker-artists create indigenous electronic tools, which they use with traditional indigenous tools to perform indigenous reimagined ceremonies. Through their immersive environments, comprised of moving images, tools, regalia, performance, and sound, Radio Healer bends media to position visual and sonic metaphors that make the familiar strange. Radio Healer is particularly interested in the seemingly ordinary semiotic systems that, when observed, become irrational, inefficient, deceptive, and contradictory. These systems encode assumptions, ideologies in discourses, and dilemmas that concretize the cultural systems that shape notions of reality.
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The collective's goals are to disrupt these notions by creating environments that provide audiences with opportunities to engage in a heightened sense of criticality about the systems we create, maintain, and adapt. The collective strives to mediate complexity capable of catalyzing public discourse, and to demonstrate indigenous self-determination through an indigenous knowledge systems approach to designs and uses of tools for hacking semiotic systems. Through these goals, Radio Healer performs inclusive re-imagined ceremonies during which the public is invited to reflect on human exigencies and dilemmas tied to obsolescence, acceleration, warfare, borders, global warming, hyper-surveillance, land use, cybernetics, market systems, historical amnesia, hi-velocity global multi-nodal networks, and the trans-mediated market valorization of human bodies.
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Radio Healer is the recipient of the 2016-2017 Arizona Commission for The Arts, Artist Research and Development Grant, and is a project in residence at the Pueblo Grande Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. Radio Healer has performed immersive environments throughout North America, in Australia, and in Namibia. They will be performing at Pueblo Grande Museum, in Phoenix, Arizona on Fridays at 7 p.m. on 10/28, 11/18, and 12/16. Following each performance, members of the audience will have the opportunity to ask questions, and speak directly with the artists. This after-hours event is free and open to the public, donations are welcome. Visit
www.radiohealer.com for more information on the artist collective and
www.pueblogrande.com for more information about Pueblo Grande Museum, located on the Southeast corner of 44th St. and Washington St.
By Radio Healer
