Andrew Graves-Johnston
So, where to begin?
Way back in 1987 I attended a huge squat party in a Kings X disused bus garage hosted by the Mutoid Waste Company. Amongst the live bands, DJ sets, street theatre, and circus acts I was confronted with awesome mixed media sculpture. These pieces included cars, TV sets and found objects. Walking home to Brixton I thought “if they can make art like that, then so can I”. For years I was an Outsider Artist, even if then that term was unknown to me. Using mostly self-taught skills I’ve worked in the creative industries, art direction, puppets and props maker, worked with bands, and even stilt-walked in parades. Since 1990 I’ve participated in over 50 exhibitions and events.
Always an activist, I took an interest in local, national and international campaigns. From attending demos to putting on benefit parties squatting venues for art exhibitions and working with co-ops to provide cheap foodstuffs. During the first half of the 2000s, I worked with a collective to bring activist news to the web. Indymedia UK was part of a worldwide network of over 160 sites that reported on the news that the mainstream media omitted. The software that Indymedia used was unique at that time, what we did back then was a forerunner of today’s ubiquitous social media. During that time I made little physical art but learnt many digital techniques and had my first stint at producing a weekly radio show.
2005 – Wanting to get back into making I discovered casting glass and bronze. Over the next eight years, I immersed myself in kiln-fired glass sculpture. Learning on part-time courses in London and every summer attending the international glass school Bildwerk Frauenau in the traditional glassmaking Bavarian forest. I got to work with, and learn from an array of international artists. As well as making and exhibiting my glass sculpture, I gave technical demonstrations, wrote articles, and made a film for the Bildwerk school.
In 2013, I applied to Camberwell College of Arts to do a Sculpture BA. Uni was hard for someone who left school at 16 and not used to the academic side of things, making was easy I already had those skills. Whilst immersing myself in the art world I couldn’t let go of my activist tendencies and was the Student Rep for my year. They didn’t have a glass department, so did the next best thing, video. Although they seem to have a huge difference they actually have similar characteristics, light/darkness, clarity/opacity and light and sight. Going back to my roots, using found super8 footage, 1960s and 70s holiday films, digitised and re-edited I presented them for my final show.
Bidding farewell to my Outsider Artist status I graduated with an honours degree in 2016.
After graduation, I started following the #NODAPL protests online. Earlier that year a Sioux elder had established a camp in the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, a centre for cultural and spiritual resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. This pipeline, as well as threatening sacred burial grounds, was seen as an ecological disaster waiting to happen as it was to pass under the Missouri River which flows into the Mississippi that provides water for 18 million people. Over the next 10 months, this protest gained global support and a huge online following. It was America’s largest and longest-running protest ever, with at times 10,000 people on site. Peaceful unarmed protesters were confronted with a brutal militarised police force, hundreds were injured, and over 900 people were arrested. This was all documented online and various groups produced films, documentaries, and video reports. One of the most comprehensive and informative is Black Snake Killaz by Unicorn Riot.
So you may be wondering what has all this to do with radio.
While watching all this unfold I started hearing music that I hadn’t heard before on the videos. I found multiple compilation albums fund-raising for the protest also with many artists new to me. One outfit that stood out for me was ‘A Tribe Called Red’ from Ottawa who were fusing indigenous native drumbeats with techno and dubstep, creating a new sound, Powwow Step. I went hunting them on the net, for more, and that opened doors to so many more tunes and genres. I made a mix-tape, and before I knew it, it was 3 hours long. Knowing that most of this music wasn’t being heard outside of America I approached Resonance FM who had hosted our radical media news show a decade previously. Saying I had a collection of music unheard in Europe and would they like a show. They asked for two sample shows and then aired them almost immediately and asked if I could do one every week. And so the Turtle Island Radio Show was born. Turtle Island is one of the indigenous names for North America.
Through the research, I have learnt much about the Native American and First Nation communities, one of the most marginalised of groups on the continent. I had known of Indigenous struggles since the 1990 Oka Crisis, from punk zines. Things like Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), Idle No More, LandBack and Decolonisation kept on coming up in my research and in the music. So I decided to include info on these and on ecological threats in the show. My musical remit is to play only indigenous musicians and their allies/accomplices and I play all genres from poetry/spoken word to country, jazz, folk, to rock, punk to techno and Hip-hop, and everything in between. My modus operandi takes its inspiration from the late legendary UK DJ John Peel.
Spending time with my partner in Austria, I learned of a network of non-commercial community radio network there, I emailed them. Two stations took up my offer, Radio Agora and Radio Freequenns. Now Radio Onde Furlane in Italy is also broadcasting the show. I spend three or four days a week on it, the social media, research and making the program all takes time. Recently the show has also gone to podcast,I was contacted out of the blue by US podcasting platform, Pantheon Podcasts. One of the guys there has links to nearby indigenous communities. He liked the fact that I was showcasing indigenous music from Turtle Island, and he offered to host and distribute the show. The podcast is called ‘Tunes from Turtle Island‘ and is released every Friday. It’s available on Apple, Google and many other podcast sites.
Literature, art, and music have always been at the forefront of societal change. Authors from Émile Zola to Ursula K. Le Guin were or wrote about activists/activism, from Francisco de Goya and Frida Kahlo to Gustav Metzger and Winston Smith amongst a long list of artists and art movements, that have embraced activism within their art. From early protest songs that came with the struggle for workers rights, through to punk and hip-hop’s fight against systems of dominance that put activism first and foremost.
I see the Turtle Island Radio Show as part of my artistic practice. As Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”
My art http://andrewgj.uk/
The show http://turtleislandradioshow.co.uk/