Minor Compositions

What might re-enchantment mean in a world organised around productivity, rationalisation and the reduction of many ways of knowing and living to one? In this episode, we discuss Fables of Re-Enchantment with anthropologist Stefania Consigliere. Drawing on three decades of work in medical anthropology and ethnopsychiatry, Consigliere describes how encounters with radically different understandings...

What might cinema look like without programmers, funding bodies, cultural gatekeepers or even conventional cinemas?  In this episode, we discuss BOOM! The Exploding Cinema and the New London Underground with filmmaker, writer and longtime Exploding Cinema participant Duncan Reekie. Emerging from London’s squatted cultural spaces in the early 1990s, Exploding Cinema developed a radically open appro...

Frantz Fanon is most often read as a thinker of colonial violence, racial domination and revolutionary rupture. But what happens if we attend instead to the Fanon concerned with creation, popular participation, self-management and the capacity of people to build new forms of life together? In this episode, we discuss Mark Purcell’s Discovering Democracy in the Work of Frantz Fanon with Purcell and...

For Heritage Open Days 2026, we took a copy of Silvia Federici’s  Caliban and the Witch to Colchester Castle and read several passages inside the building. In 1645, the Castle was used to imprison and interrogate women accused of witchcraft during the East Anglian persecutions associated with Matthew Hopkins. Federici does not mention Colchester itself, but she does single out Essex, noting that m...

What becomes possible when study is detached from education, accreditation and the demand for individual improvement? And what kinds of social relations emerge when study is approached not as preparation for a qualification or career, but as something worth doing in itself? Here are are joined by Eli Meyerhoff, author of Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World , and Giovanni Marmont,...

In this episode we speak with Abe Walker and Callum Cant about how workers produce knowledge of their own exploitation – and when making that knowledge visible risks strengthening the systems of management and control they oppose. Beginning with Walker’s work on counter-accounting, the conversation explores workers’ attempts to challenge official narratives through alternative records, inquiries a...

In this episode, we speak with Nicholas Beuret and Keir Milburn about ecological transition as a terrain of class struggle – not simply a technical shift in energy systems, but a contested reorganisation of investment, work, infrastructure and everyday life. They examine how the existing green transition uses ecological crisis to stimulate investment and renew capitalist growth while imposing job...

In this episode, we speak with Erin Manning and Giovanni Marmont for a conversation about how use might be detached from productivity, mastery, and measurable achievement. Moving between studious use, the pragmatics of the useless, colonial property, football, maple syrup, improvised infrastructures, and the struggle to reclaim time, they explore forms of collective life grounded in entanglement r...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 7 Enduring Otherwise   In this episode, we talk with Ferdiansyah Thajib about his book Enduring Otherwise: Muslim Queer and Trans Worldmaking in Indonesia . Drawing on ethnographic research in Aceh, Yogyakarta and Jakarta, Ferdi explores how queer and trans Muslims build meaningful lives within social, religious and political conditions that often refuse...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 6 The Institution Negated?   In this episode we are joined by John Foot, Susana Caló, and Godofredo Enes Pereira for a wide-ranging conversation on the publication in English of The Negated Institution, and the radical milieus that shaped it, emerging from the turbulent political and intellectual landscape of the 1960s and 70s. The discussion traces the...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 5 Defund Culture by Any Means Necessary   In this episode owe are joined by Gary Hall and Seth Wheeler for a wide-ranging conversation on cultural funding, radical publishing, and the changing conditions of collective knowledge production. The discussion begins with Gary Hall’s recent book Defund Culture , which challenges conventional calls to increase...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 4 Wages Against Dreamwork   In this episode of Minor Compositions, the usual format is playfully overturned as Richard Gilman-Opalsky stages a friendly “revolt,” taking over hosting duties to interview Stevphen Shukaitis about The Wages of Dreamwork , co-written with Joanna Figiel. What unfolds is less a conventional author interview than a comradely and...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 3 Communism Actually In this episode of the Minor Compositions, we discuss Communist Ontologies with its authors Richard Gilman-Opalsky and Bruno Gulli, exploring their proposal that communism be understood not only as a political program but as a form of life. The conversation ranges across questions of political economy, ontology, and revolutionary sub...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 2 Jazz is My Religion, Ted Joans is My Perspective    In this episode of the Minor Compositions, we are joined by Steven Belletto and Grégory Pierrot, in order to discuss Steven’s book  Black Surrealist. The Legend of Ted Joans. Together we explore Joans as Beat Generation insider, jazz trumpeter, collage artist, Pan-Africanist, and self-styled Surrealis...

S2E1 – In girum imus nocteet consumimur igni Season 2 opens with a conversation with Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson – filmmakers, artists, and co-founders of Firefly Frequencies – reflecting on radio as a collective, political, and affective medium. Moving between the history of autonomous radio, projects such as Lullabies for the Revolution and Terminal Beach, and collaborations including the...

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 43 Communize the city   This episode begins with Kike España’ presenting his essay “Communize the City: Towards an Insurgent Vicinity,” a text that examines the contemporary urban condition through the lens of financial brutalism, before segueing into a discussion of themes from it. España argues that cities have become logistical infrastructures of extraction, w...

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 42 We Are Making a Podcast About Mark Fisher   In this episode, we speak with artists Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter of Close and Remote about their sprawling, collaborative, and genre-bending project We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher . The conversation traces the origins of the film: how an initial spark in Fisher’s writing grew into a hybrid work that fus...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 41 Alifuru World: Stateless Histories, Decolonial Futures   Discussion with Ferdiansyah Thajib & Hypatia Vourloumis on the forthcoming book Anarchy in Alifuru: The History of Stateless Societies in the Maluku Islands by Bima Satria Putra Putra’s book traces the histories of the Alifuru peoples – those who refused incorporation into the state formatio...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 40 Utopia in the Factory?   Discussion with Rhiannon Firth & John Preston on their new book Utopia in the Factory. Prefigurative Knowledge Against Cybernetics There’s long been this seductive idea that automation, AI, and robotics might finally deliver us into a kind of post-work utopia. You can find it everywhere, from Silicon Valley pitch decks to...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 39 From Disalienation to Collective Care. Institutional Psychotherapy as Resistance Discussion with Elena Vogman & Marlon Miguel discussing the work of François Tosquelles and Jean Oury  Born amidst the ruins of World War II and the shadow of fascist extermination policies, institutional psychotherapy emerged not just as a form of mental health care,...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 38 Post-War Surrealism and Anti-authoritarianism   This discussion brings together Abigail Susik and Michael Löwy to explore the international history of surrealism after 1945, with a focus on its enduring anti-authoritarian spirit. Often misunderstood as an avant-garde movement confined to the interwar years and extinguished by World War II or the death...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 37 Universal Prostitution & the Crisis of Labor   This episode is a conversation with Jaleh Mansoor on the themes of her new book Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction: A Counterhistory . In this provocative work, Mansoor offers a counternarrative of modernism and abstraction and a rethinking of Marxist aesthetics. Drawing on Marx’s concep...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 36 Feral Class Untamed. Unheard. Unstoppable. For this episode with have a chat with Marc Garrett about his forthcoming book Feral Class. The book is Marc Garrett’s raw and resonant memoir of surviving – and creating – on the margins. It delves into the lived realities of working-class artists, charting Garrett’s journey from the edges of cultural produc...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 35 It’s summer and we’re feeling a bit lazy… so rather than record something new, for this episode we’re presenting a recording of a seminar discussion between Stefano Harney & Stevphen Shukaitis that occurred this May in London. It was part of an event organized by CHRONOS from Royal Holloway.  You are on the way to destruction, make your time . In...

Minor Compositions Season 1 Episode 34 Communism After Deleuze   Discussion with Alex Taek-Gwang Lee about his new book Communism After Deleuze .  What if communism was always the secret engine of Deleuze’s thought? This episode uncovers a hidden itinerary running through Deleuze’s work: a subterranean current where the idea of the Third World becomes a cipher for revolutionary desire. Against the...