ACFM

The #ACFM gang square up a suitably momentous topic for their milestone 20th Trip: revolution! Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert and Keir Milburn wonder how the idea of political revolution ever became thinkable, and if it’s still thinkable today. Was the sexual revolution a real revolution? How did disillusionment with Soviet communism affect our political imagination? […]

In anticipation of the next Trip, the ACFM trio deliver a condensed but essential history of revolution from Oliver Cromwell to Fidel Castro, with stop-offs in France, America, Haiti, China, Spain and Russia. What does it take to cook up a revolution? Is the French Revolution still relevant to our idea of radical social upheaval? […]

In this #ACFM Microdose to accompany the gang’s recent Trip into space, Keir is joined by Fred Scharmen, author of Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space. Drawing on his background in architecture and spatial design, Scharmen unpacks the human desire to go into space and create new worlds from scratch. How […]

Jeremy Gilbert, Nadia Idle and Keir Milburn explore the politics of space. What even is space, and why does it so often seem to be the domain of the political right? How does the built environment have the power to discipline or liberate us? And why do all the billionaires want to get off the […]

What could our towns and streets become after the pandemic? Ahead of the next #ACFM on space, Nadia Idle goes down to street level to discuss spatial equality with architect and planner Pooja Agrawal. As the co-founder of Public Practice, a social enterprise bringing good design into local government, Agrawal spends a lot time thinking […]

Keir Milburn, Nadia Idle and Jeremy Gilbert get on the couch to talk about therapy. Wrangling with how to square their collectivist politics with the introspective work of therapy, they wonder if people on the left are more inclined to seek such treatment, and what role physical exercise plays in their mental wellbeing. Analysing their […]

The point of psychodrama is not to create beautiful theatre, laughs practitioner Nada Sabet. To accompany the next #ACFM Trip on the topic of therapy, host Nadia Idle finds out about an unusual therapeutic technique which borrows elements of theatre, psychiatry and psychotherapy to gain insight into different facets of our identity. Nada explains how […]

What do we mean by solidarity? Keir Milburn, Nadia Idle and Jeremy Gilbert consider the meaning of a much-used word in this unusual Trip, recorded live as part of HKW’s online festival, Acid Communism: Spectres of the Counterculture. With music from Nina Simone, The Youngbloods and The Special AKA, the gang consider the legacy of […]

In this extended Trip, Keir Milburn, Nadia Idle and Jeremy Gilbert wrestle with the idea of “the long ‘90s”: a set of cultural, political and affective assumptions that have outlasted the 20th century, and from which a certain cohort of today’s politicians, commentators and columnists cannot seem to escape. With music from Roni Size, Stereolab […]

The proposed new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill is an obvious assault on the right to protest, threatening penalties of up to 10 years in prison for “causing public nuisance”. With the bill on its way to becoming law, Jeremy Gilbert, Nadia Idle and Keir Milburn draw on their own experiences to discuss the […]