Blake Pfeil (US 2026)
33 min
“Fading Transmissions from a Republic of Ruins” is an experimental live docu-audio performance and visual exhibition that explores abandoned spaces as sites of memory, disappearance, and lingering transmissions. The piece combines live storytelling, archival tape, and ambient field recordings, manipulated in order to create the feeling of the audience becoming a rogue radio transmission that drifts into America’s historical underbelly. Developed under the banner of the U.K. Press Gazette Future of Media Award nominee Blake Pfeil's acclaimed multimedia travelog “All-American Ruins,” this particular experience journeys into the abandoned Sumner School in Topeka, Kansas — one of the segregated schools central to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. Drifting in and out of dreamlike sonic reconstructions of personal reflection and grandiose Americana mythology about migration and race, the piece explores what it means for a place historically significant to exist simultaneously as landmark, ruin, and unresolved cultural strife.
Produced by Blake Pfeil