Minor Compositions: Publishing the Unruly, the Radical, and the Yet-to-Come.
Minor Compositions is a research theorizing publishing project that is located, at the moment, within the London metropolitan basin of collective intelligence. Its main aim is to bring together, develop, and mutate forms of autonomist thought and practice, avant-garde aesthetics, and an everyday approach to politics.
More information: https://www.minorcompositions.info
As well on this webstite, Minor Compositions can be listened to via all the usual podcast type places including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc...
What might cinema look like without programmers, funding bodies, cultural gatekeepers or even conventional cinemas?
In this episode, we discuss BOOM! The Exploding Cinema and the New London Underground with filmmaker, writer and longtime Exploding Cinema participant Duncan Reekie. Emerging from London’s squatted cultural spaces in the early 1990s, Exploding Cinema developed a radically open approach to exhibition: films were shown without curatorial selection, anyone could become involved in organising, and screenings could take place wherever the necessary space, equipment and collective energy could be assembled. Reekie reflects on the institutional gatekeeping that shaped experimental film culture in the period, and on how projects such as the London Filmmakers’ Co-op, CoolTan and other underground screening spaces helped make a different model possible. Exploding Cinema was not simply another outlet for films excluded elsewhere. Its screenings attempted to create a different relationship between filmmakers, organisers and audiences, with exhibition itself becoming a form of collective cultural practice.
The conversation also explores the collective’s refusal of professionalisation and careerism, including its suspicion of individual recognition and the continuing power of institutions of taste and selection. What does it mean to build autonomous cultural forms without simply reproducing the structures they set out to escape? Finally, the episode considers what has changed over more than thirty years. Digital technologies have made filmmaking far more accessible, while gentrification, rising costs and the disappearance of cheap or squatted spaces have made the social conditions for underground culture harder to sustain. Online distribution may make films easier to circulate, but it cannot fully replace the conviviality of gathering together to watch, argue and continue the conversation. Exploding Cinema remains a striking example of autonomous media not simply as radical content, but as the collective creation of other ways to make, show and encounter culture.
More On the Book (https://explodingcinema.org/product/boom-the-exploding-cinema-and-the-new-london-underground/)
Intro / Outro: Breach the Peace – Spiral Tribe
Made in collaboration with Firefly Frequencies
30 Sept 2026
Fanon & Democracy
Frantz Fanon is most often read as a thinker of colonial violence, racial domination and revolutionary rupture. But what happens if we attend instead to the Fanon concerned with creation, popular participation, self-management and the capacity of people to build new forms of life together? In this episode, we discuss Mark Purcell’s Discovering Democracy in the Work of Frantz Fanon with Purcell and Mrinalini Greedharry. The book proposes a distinction between a “major Fanon,” organised around negation, critique and the destruction of oppressive structures, and a “minor Fanon” who emerges in moments of affirmation, collective experimentation and democratic self-management. This minor Fanon appears in discussions of Algerian villagers taking responsibility for their own affairs, but also in Fanon’s psychiatric practice and his attempts to create forms of institutional life in which patients participate actively in their own care.
The conversation explores both the possibilities and the tensions of this distinction. Can anti-colonialism, anti-racism and anti-fascism be understood primarily as negative projects, or can resistance itself form part of the construction of new relations? How far can creation and affirmation be separated from the work of confronting structures of domination? And might Fanon’s psychiatric practice – shaped through experimentation, failure and encounters with the social and cultural realities of Algeria – complicate any straightforward division between destruction and creation? The discussion moves through Fanon’s relation to institutional psychotherapy, questions of cultural specificity and postcolonial thought, and the importance of recognising the capacities that oppressed people already possess. Purcell draws on Zora Neale Hurston as an example of attending to Black creativity, life and cultural production rather than allowing racism to determine the entire field of attention, while the conversation considers what might be gained – and what might be lost – by shifting political emphasis from opposition toward creation. More broadly, the episode asks what a radical politics of affirmation might look like without abandoning the necessity of resistance: how critique, collective experimentation, cultural production and the creation of new forms of life might coexist rather than being treated as mutually exclusive political choices.
More On the Book (https://www.routledge.com/Discovering-Democracy-in-the-Work-of-Frantz-Fanon/Purcell/p/book/9781041192886)
Intro / Outro: Is It Possible – Hopeless Dregs of Humanity
Thumbnail based on a still from Chroniques fidèles survenues au siècle dernier à l’hôpital psychiatrique Blida-Joinville, au temps où le Docteur Frantz Fanon était chef de la cinquième division entre 1953 et 1956 (True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in the Last Century, when Dr Frantz Fanon Was Head of the Fifth Ward between 1953 and 1956). Drected by Abdenour Zahzah.
13 Sept 2026
Caliban & the Castle
For Heritage Open Days 2026, we took a copy of Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch to Colchester Castle (https://nihilistoptimism.blogspot.com/2026/09/caliban-castle.html) and read several passages inside the building. In 1645, the Castle was used to imprison and interrogate women accused of witchcraft during the East Anglian persecutions associated with Matthew Hopkins. Federici does not mention Colchester itself, but she does single out Essex, noting that most English witch trials occurred here and connecting this concentration to enclosure, land privatisation, poverty and the destruction of collective forms of life.
For Federici, the witch hunt was not simply an eruption of superstition. Those accused were disproportionately poor women, while their accusers were often landlords, employers and wealthier neighbours. The persecution of “witches” was also bound up with attacks on forms of knowledge, mutual dependence and social autonomy that stood in the way of a new economic order. Reading Caliban and the Witch inside Colchester Castle makes that history unusually tangible. This was not simply a backdrop to persecution, but part of its infrastructure: a place of imprisonment, interrogation and coercion. There was also something fitting about reading a book so concerned with enclosure on the one day of the year when entry to the Castle was free. Less a remembrance of “witches,” then, than of the people who were made into witches, and of what their persecution tells us about enclosure, poverty, gender, knowledge and power.
Who has been a guest on Minor Compositions
Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.
Kike España
Sophie Mellor
Simon Poulter
Bima Satria Putra
Rhiannon Firth
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