Maerie C. Fricke works with sound, materiality, and process-based sculptural installations. Drawing on her research, she develops intermedia works that explore material traces, technical infrastructures, and forms of transmission. She is currently exploring a partisan understanding of resistance through the appropriation of knowledge and investigating the history and materiality of radios as sites of communication, contact, and political agency. After spending an Erasmus year studying site-specific art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, she transferred from the Kassel Art Academy to the Düsseldorf Art Academy to join Nina Canell’s class.

per ardua ad astra (870 kHz) A message full of questions to the universe is broadcast via a homemade AM transmitter and received by analog radios. Enveloped in dust, interference, and electromagnetic noise, the signal is reflected in the Earth’s expanding radio bubble as a drifting archive, in which the broadcasts continue to resonate long after their voices have already faded away.