Maqam.tv is an itinerant broadcasting channel airing video content from mainly North to Central Africa and South to Central Asia online and offline. The term broadcasting is taken in its two senses here: for one thing, it’s a matter of communicating a given content. And for the other, it’s a matter of sowing seeds in a given area by hand –and so: the back is to the breeze, the walk is slow-paced, the casting is measured.

Maqam.tv holds hoards of joy within! Yet anger too. It gets its tender force from gestures of liberation, resistance, reparation and healing. And grew from the urgency in contesting archiving protocols and in highjacking broadcasting frequencies. It wishes for a redressing. And thus, it stands.

Maqam.tv has several online and offline conducts, where it expands on a cinematic language developped from and around the format of the excerpt, or the segment, or the passage, or the sample. It's a format that breaks open, that pollenizes, that engenders. It cultivates the ungrammatical, the cripling and the fortunate. Favors the no-longer-is, the almost-was, the not-yet and the soon-to. It's a language of hope.

Maqam.tv thinks of itself as a living, porous, archival station. The non-authoritarian, non-immortal, non-sanitarian type of archive that likes to undertake in sabotage acts against its very self. That’s because it does not much believe in the alleged absoluteness, timelessness and neutrality of the archival object. Maqam.tv’s archival spaces are thus the organic and vulnerable sites for the transmission of the other organic and vulnerable recollections and imaginations of individuals and collectives. It is uncertain and incomplete. Probably unreliable too. And can be negotiable any time.

Offline, Maqam.tv regularly collaborates with individuals, cultural institutions and nonprofits, hosting screenings (of excerpts or full-length formats), talks and workshops in movie theaters, art spaces, outdoor areas and classrooms.
And then online, Maqam.tv invests its own domaines and that of others with varying curriculums. Mainly, its virtual applications wish to endanger the fortified cellars of information. They find inspiration in cyberpunk practices, and other discontented and non-compliant virtual exercises that reclaim back the flowing, streaming or torrential character of knowledge access on the internet. Maqam.tv's online components call for a reconsideration of the fabrication and dissemination of knowledge on the internet.

For now, Maqam.tv has three programs ongoing: instagram, research cycles and transmission.



For years, Maqam.tv has been investing Instagram as a curatorial platform (instagram.com/maqam.tv) following a cut:collaged:captioned methodology and focused on broadcasting unanchored audiovisual pieces for some thing to flourish from the cracks. And perhaps you trip over one of those outgrows in your errancy?



Maqam.tv’s research cycles are programs sketching out lines of enquiry to be freely answered through different expression, story-telling and transmission practices. They function a little like stages for video screenings paired with audio, visual, performative or text-based exercises. And their aim is to unpack the stakes of one central theme in the most unimpeded ways.

The cycles are spaces in which stable and incarcerated research frameworks can be disavowed by way of commoning; co-creating, co-teaching and co-organizing, all through ever-changing bodies and formulas. They are unanchored, transmigratory even: they pass from a state to another, from a body to another, from a place to another; and they’re certainly not on a rush. They take their time, stretch over months, sometimes do not have a determined ending, and sometimes again overlap. A cycle develops a little like a jazz chorus actually, with preliminaries, or series of improvised, free, segments after each melodic part that elevate the register little by little, until reaching its climax.
The ongoing research cycle is Le corps par dessus l'image, find more information here.



This one comes as the arrogant, cheeky, self-centered younger sibling. It does not care too much about defending a given thesis in elaborate and lenghty fashion. It is mostly here for the fun. And because it is so inclined to act on impulse, it won’t wait long before getting out there. It’ll be showing up here and there, will try its best to stick to schedules, will probably end up not so much doing so.

maqamtv.com/transmission is a space for broadcasting, it only goes live for limited amounts of hours. It looks a lot like channel surfing; it’s groovy and upbeat, scanning content relating to one defined subject outside of narrative conventions. It draws inspiration from 90s-00s late-night tv programs that served as the unconfined platforms for the freest audiovisual expression, but most importantly, from contestational and anti-establishment strategies for image making. Sometimes, the broadcasts travel outside of its dedicated online space, but that just depends on thematics and encounters.
Find the transmission page here.



If you'd like to get more info, become a contributor, host a Maqam.tv screening or collaborate in a way or another please address a note to me, Sophia, through: maqamtvchannel@gmail.com.
You can get updated on Maqam.tv's upcoming online and offline programs and events by subscribing to the newsletter here or following the instagram page.

programming, curation · identity design · web design · web development: sophia attigui