What have we been doing:

Nooshin Hakim Javadi and Pedram Baldari create a mobile radio station as a platform for collaboration with researchers on immigration, mobility and trauma. The University of Minnesota’s Center for New Americans located in the Law School and the Target Studio for Creative Collaboration at the Weisman Art Museum served as hosts for the project. We developed a program of broadcasts, consisting of interviews, storytelling, and sound performances, and a program of discursive engagement with academics and immigrant communities. Javadi and Baldari use radio as both a tool and as a metaphor, envisioning a flexible yet resistant and mobile rhizome-like engagement that extends beyond the walls of the museum. This project is supported by a grant from the Stardust Arts Foundation. From the Weisman Art Museum website : https://wam.umn.edu/incubator-project-radio-rhizome/

​Issues we have touched on in the past

Radio Rhizome (2019-Ongoing) is an ongoing project to occupy, infiltrate and reactivate spaces and institutions in order to mobilize discourses of legal/illegal, documented/undocumented and within/without. Our questions begin with similarities between our wartime experiences in our native land and the U.S immigrant communities that are physically and psychologically targeted by immigration law enforcement. In conversations with ACLU Minnesota we became convinced that a mobile radio platform is the safest and most reliable medium for us to ensure our artistic needs and immigrant communities' desire to create safe and decentralized modes of communication. We have employed this radio project in two main ways. First, we broadcast content to performers who carry pocket radios into designated locations.The second is for immigrant communities in rural Minnesota. Working with Right to Know training, we deploy the radio station as a public warning system against unjust raids, illegal arrests and other actions that create an unsafe environment for immigrant communities. More recently, we have been working with engineers to transform building facades as antennae for our radio station. We choose buildings based on their architectural and historical relevance to our project, such as the Weisman Art Museum with its metal facade. We continue to look for for collaborators on this project.

We want to expand the scope of our activities and use our platform for issues such as environmental struggles around oil pipelines going through preservations, under rivers and through public lands. The catastrophic side effects of these pipelines can be unimaginable for the wildlife, water resources and the land they go through.