This episode is a recording of Philippe Beck in conversation with Gorica Orsholits and Torgeir Fjeld on the topic of Documentaries: electronic speleology and the archive of the future. Philippe Beck, in his latest book of prose – Documentaries – brought together rewritten texts from his Facebook news feed running from March 27. 2015, to July 7. 2024. He created new stories, a book of documentaries which contains traces of the past, erasures, losses and heterotopias. It is a work of poetics and political meditation, criticism and evocation. It seems that this exploration of the electronic archive and media-driven friendships reveals a world of complex relationships, between participants: people and the institution of Facebook, where meaning is constantly deferred and inherent tensions and contradictions create dense discursive networks of stories, particularly in the realm of the political. These stories became inspirations for Philippe Beck's book of poetry Abstraite et Plaisantine.

In this episode, dramaturg, poet, and academic Matthew Goulish and director Lin Hixson talk about their innovative approach to theatre with Torgeir Fjeld. Their ambulating theatre, Every house has a door, stages performance works and performance-related projects of historically or critically neglected subjects in many media. Based in Chicago, their company has become a hub for diverse, intergenerational project-specific teams of specialists, including emerging as well as internationally recognised artists. We spoke to them in conjunction with Matthew's keynote address to the 4th Ereignis Conference in Gdynia, Poland, on 11 August 2024.

Image by Nathan Keay, 2020. Used by permission.

This podcast features an interview with Dr Adam Staley Groves, who teaches a course on Wallace Stevens and the technique of poetry for Ereignis Institute. To Dr Groves, to be a poet is to become aware of circumstances that are in our lives; it is to understand the poetry that is with us all.

In this podcast, we also discuss the figure of former US president Donald Trump as an artist, as someone who creates the familiar from the unfamiliar. The important thing for Dr Groves is that by 'understanding him as an artist we can get past some of the barriers we have to accepting him as a human being, and then we can guard in a supremely sympathetic way our own humanity from the sort of gross polarisation we see.'