Frecuency debris
Vienna, Austria 2025
Curator Carmen Lael Hines
Text Carmen Lael Hines
Photo Nacho Errando
Spanish Embassy in Austria - Interview
Materials: Metal antennas, metal cables
Frequency Debris is an exhibition and sculptural installation by Elena Rocabert, developed during the Never At Home international residency programme which took place across 4 weeks in May and June of 2025.
Radio antennas are metal devices that act as interfaces between radio waves and electrical signals. Coming in various shapes and sizes, they receive and transfer propagating waves through the air. Their shapes speak to how such currents are transferred and received for aerial dissemination. Infrastructures of radio and TV, radio antennas are the prime facilitators of informational circulation, and the materiality of media as systems of transference that partially evade the human eye.
Austria’s oldest broadcasting center, the FUNKHAUS, is a building steeped in layered histories of information control and geopolitical tensions between the Western and Eastern blocs. Essential to this history are the material processes of recording, capturing, and transmitting sound. Radio antennas become emblems of these infrastructures of mass communication, as they simultaneously organize, filter, and constrain what can be heard. Above all, they illustrate the limitations of how we visually and spatially conceive of “media.” What components facilitate and drive how knowledge is controlled ?
Rocabert’s intervention visualizes the media archaeology of the FUNKHAUS by repurposing second-hand radio antennas found around the city of Vienna, transforming these instruments into sculptural elements existing somewhere between functionality, ornament or dystopic resonance. As an architectural site, the FUNKHAUS is uniquely designed for sonic operations—constructed with materials that ensure both acoustic isolation and the seamless transmission of radio frequencies rendered into “sound.” These radio antennas are gestures to such material histories, and invitations to reflect on the “how” of information as sonic current.
Throughout her residency, Rocabert undertook a close reading of the building and its acoustic infrastructure, engaging with histories of espionage, surveillance, and the technical mechanics of sound transmission. The resulting work is a spatial installation that materializes the building’s dense and often hidden media history.
Each antenna was sourced in, around and beyond the city of Vienna via digital marketplaces. Rocabert traveled to each destination in person, communicating with Willhaben sellers selling these objects. A peculiar commodity, these objects serve as bridges between historical and contemporary systems of communication. Somewhere between obvious functionality and obsolescence, their preserve is both pragmatic and dystopic, poetic and obvious, a tension that emerges frequently in Rocabert’s research oriented spatial practice. Frequency Debris prompts reflection on the physical infrastructure of media technologies and the narratives embedded in their decay—when revolutionary tools are reduced to discarded remnants and when the poetics of the intangible meet material form.
