Villa Aurora X Lookout FM Radio - Episode 19 of "if the house could speak"
In January of 2025 the Palisades Fire came within feet of Villa Aurora. Miraculously, the house survived, and with it the radio transmitter that broadcasts from there throughout the Santa Monica Mountains and the beaches below.
This series explores the voices, past and present, that reverberate at Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger’s former home. For the past 30 years, Villa Aurora has been an artist residence, a place where exile and expression meet, where history and contemporary events converge.
During the process of rebuilding and awaiting our artists’ return, we will be broadcasting newly produced, archival and historical footage for you to listen to and maybe wonder: Is this really only a house or, like Carl Jung suggests, can the composition of a room induce the realization of new truths?
Each episode of if the house could speak will be broadcast on a loop for 24 hours with no interruption starting at 12 PM Pacific Daylight Time. For our listeners across the world, that corresponds to 7 PM Coordinated Universal Time and 9 PM Middle European Time.
Episode 19
Oracles of the Interior
Birgit Kreipe, in conversation with Friedel Schmoranzer, Program Director of Villa Aurora.
Recorded in Lion Feuchtwanger's study at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles.
Featuring an excerpt of Kreipe reading “Notes on AIRE,” recorded live at the Thomas Mann House book launch for Villa Aurora: Exile, Art and Freedom in Los Angeles, June 6.
Birgit Kreipe, a practicing psychotherapist as well as the author of beautyfarm, SOMA, and AIRE, discusses the book she is completing during her Los Angeles residency, IMAGO, and how the specific charge of writing in someone else's house and someone else's country shapes what surfaces on the page.
The conversation moves through the animal and vegetal life that recurs across her poems (poppies, oracular flora, landscapes that seem to speak back), the entwining of psychoanalysis and poetic form, and Carl Jung's proposition that a room's composition can itself induce the recognition of new truths.
Kreipe also reflects on Los Angeles as a city saturated with astrology, psychics, and spiritual improvisation, ecological and historical layering in landscape, and what it means to write toward individuation amid what she calls the era's "multiple crises."
Birgit Kreipe was Villa Aurora's off-Campus Fellow from April to June 2026 at the Thomas Mann House.
About LOOKOUT FM
LOOKOUT FM is a West Coast terrestrial radio home for the broadcast of "transmission art:" experimental audio composition, modern serials, data sonification, radio plays, multi-day compositions, and radio-centric performances. Their licensed stations in Burbank, Hollywood, and Pacific Palisades function as FM exhibition spaces where radio art is presented without regard to constraints of time, structure, or commercial consideration.
