Radio Healer is a Xicanx and Native American led collective founded in Phoenix, Arizona. The collective is Edgar Cardenas, Randy Kemp, Raven Kemp, Rykelle Kemp, Cristóbal MartÃnez and Meredith Martinez. As a group, these artist-hackers create indigenous electronic tools, which they use with traditional indigenous tools to perform indigenous reimagined ceremony. Through their immersive environments, comprised of moving images, tools, regalia, performance, and sound, the collective bends media to position visual and sonic metaphors that de-familiarize the "ordinary."
Radio Healer is particularly interested in the taken for granted semiotic systems that, when observed, become irrational, inefficient, deceptive, and contradictory. These systems encode assumptions, ideologies in discourses, and dilemmas that concretize the cultural systems that help shape perceptions of reality. Radio Healer's goals are to disrupt these perceptions by creating environments that provide audiences with opportunities to engage in a heightened sense of criticality about the systems we create, maintain, and adapt. The collective strives to catalyze public discourse, and demonstrate self-determination through an indigenous knowledge systems approach to the designs and uses of their hacked tools. Radio Healer performs their tools to encourage the transformation of semiotic systems in terms of their functions and meanings. With these goals in mind, Radio Healer stages futurist propositions during which audiences are invited to reflect on human exigencies and dilemmas tied to obsolescence, acceleration, warfare, borders, mass surveillance, land use, cybernetics, market systems, historical amnesia, hi-velocity global multi-nodal networks, and the trans-mediated market valorization of human bodies.
Radio Healer is the recipient of the 2016-2017 Arizona Commission for The Arts, Artist Research and Development Grant, and is a former project in residence at the Pueblo Grande Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. Radio Healer has performed throughout North America, in Australia, and in Namibia.
Radio Healer acknowledges the important contributions of previous collaborators: Sam Anderson, Devon Armstrong-Best, Robert Esler, Fabio Fernandes, Ashya Flint, Joe French, J.C. Golding, Zarco Guerrero, Byron Lahey, Fernando Lino, Aileen Mapes, Ryan McFadden, Jessica Mumford, Stjepan Rajko, Melissa S. Rex, Janie Ross, Maritza Montiel Tafur, Lisa Tolentino, Monty Walters, and mac n. zie.