The two-part conversation I recently had with Yannis Orestis-Papadimitriou on his Movement Radio show, The Archipelago, is now available to listen back to online! You can find Part One here and Part Two here, or you can listen via Mixcloud below.
This was a wide-ranging conversation and could have likely carried on for hours. Many thanks to Yannis for having me and check out all the other amazing things that Movement Radio do here.
Mark Fisher and the Lost Futures (Part 1)
In his book Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher, author and photographer Matt Colquhoun elaborates on his former teacher’s later ideas, tragically interrupted by Fisher’s untimely passing in January 2017. He would later edit and introduce Fisher’s unfinished final lectures, now published under the title Post Capitalist Desire.
In his final days, Fisher moved away from his initial diagnosis of a standstill in political and cultural imagination that he termed “Capitalist Realism”, towards seeking a way out through a project he outlined as Acid Communism.
This episode of The Archipelago features the first of two conversations with Matt Colquhoun, in which he discusses Mark Fisher’s trajectory from the experimental counterculture of the CCRU lab in the mid-90s to his pessimistic take on Capitalist Realism. He also talks about the concept of Egress in practice: how Fisher’s passing affected his community, which is finding new potentialities in his writings under the presence of his absence.
Mark Fisher and the Lost Futures (Part 2)
In the previous conversation with Matt Colquhoun, the author of Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher and editor of Fisher’s final lectures Postcapitalist Desire, we ran through the events and processes that gave shape to his thought for two decades: the CCRU, his contemporary thinkers and his diagnosis of the cultural and political standstill we find ourselves in.
In his second appearance on the Archipelago, Matt Colquhoun uses Oneohtrix Point Never albums as a starting point to examine cultural practices that re-energize imagination and examine how perceptions of different temporalities affect our collective psyche. He also talks about Tarantino films, depression as illness and metaphor and the ideas that advance or block the potential of radical politics today.