Named after the anarchist pirate station founded in Bologna in 1976, Radio Alice accompanied a 2012 exhibition at Melbourne’s Margaret Lawrence Gallery.

The original station treated broadcasting as a porous, unruly medium through which music, theory, street reports and collective speech could circulate outside the authorised channels of the state. 

Curated by Nik Papas, the project brought together Damiano Bertoli, Sue Dodd, Marco Fusinato, Tom Nicholson and Riccardo Vaglini. Across essays, images and documentation, the catalogue examines collective authorship, political subjectivity, autonomous media and the uneasy traffic between radical art and organised resistance. Its governing theme is whether artistic form might itself become a way of producing common life—temporary, unstable and resistant to command. 

This is a strong piece of local art history as well as a compact document of post-autonomist political thought. It will suit readers interested in artists’ publishing, pirate radio, Italian radicalism, collective practice and the point where the avant-garde stops being a stylistic category and becomes an argument about who gets to speak.

Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Victorian College of the Arts, 2012. Illustrated exhibition catalogue. Minor edge and corner wear; clean, firmly bound copy.