The Russi Hive

The Russi Hive is a podcast about creativity—unfolding in conversations with expected and unexpected people; not only artists, but anyone with a practice, a system, or an obsession that shapes how they think and live. Presented by Ricco/Maresca and hosted by Alejandra Russi, The Russi Hive is filmed and recorded in the gallery’s New York City space. This show is a place for those drawn to the unseen mechanics of making, the inner weather reports, invented languages, and the way an idea arrives at the "wrong" time and still changes everything.

The Russi Hive is a society podcast hosted by Alejandra Russi, with 18 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Alejandra Russi hosts The Russi Hive, a society show with 18 episodes published.

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  Episode #1

  ChatGPT: Questionable Guest — A Voice Without a Body, a Body Without a Voice

  Sep 17, 202629 minS2

  Season 2 of The Russi Hive opens with its first Hive Construct: part interview, part performance, part conceptual experiment. Alejandra collaborates with Canadian artist Max Streicher, placing one of his inflatable figures across from her as a physical proxy for ChatGPT. Streicher provides the body, ChatGPT provides the voice, and the resulting arrangement turns the interview itself into material—playing with presence, simulation, embodiment, and the uneasy fascination of talking to something that is emphatically not a person. The conversation moves from how AI actually produces language to the places where machine intelligence and human thought resemble one another—and where they decisively part ways. From there, things get stranger: human inefficiency as creative fuel, the danger of outsourcing the difficult parts of making, AI as collaborator rather than replacement, and the possibility of a new cognitive territory emerging between people and the responsive systems they increasingly think alongside. This episode is an independent project by The Russi Hive. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by OpenAI. ChatGPT’s responses were developed through prior conversations with Alejandra Russi and delivered live during the recorded interview. Original music and sonic identity by Antfood. Sound design: Federico Casazza. Follow The Russi Hive: YouTube Instagram TikTok Substack

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  Episode #15

  Creative Dispatch 3: The Restless Form — Range, Disruption, and the Hive Construct

  Sep 3, 20267 minS1

  In the final installment of a late-summer Creative Dispatch trilogy closing Season 1 of The Russi Hive, Alejandra considers what a filmed podcast might be “allowed” to become and why the format still feels widely underdeveloped. Dispatch 3 is about disruption, restlessness, and the creative freedom that comes from refusing a single default shape. As Season 2 comes into view, Alejandra thinks through the filmed podcast as something more elastic than documentation: a form that can make room for performance, objects, staging, strange encounters, and experiments like the Hive Construct, a new category for episodes that bend the interview format itself. The episode also widens into a meditation on appetite: the desire for different worlds, moods, formats, and encounters—and the point of view that holds them together. Original music and sonic identity by Antfood. Sound design: Federico Casazza. Follow The Russi Hive: YouTube Instagram TikTok Substack

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  Episode #11

  Natalie Crist: Ecosystem Builder — Bloom, Decay, and Designing for Awe

  Jul 23, 202654 minS1

  In Episode 11 of The Russi Hive Podcast , Alejandra sits down with landscape designer Natalie Crist for a conversation about gardens as sensual, unruly worlds—places where beauty, ecology, pleasure, and human intention are constantly negotiating with one another. Crist came to her practice by way of medicine and horticulture, and that double perspective runs through the episode. She talks about plants not simply as material, but as active presences—edible, therapeutic, sensory, seasonal—and about the ways a landscape can work on the body before the mind has fully caught up. At the center of the episode is a different way of thinking about design: not as control, but as attention. Crist speaks about shaping outdoor spaces while allowing nature to lead—working with impermanence, surprise, and the restless intelligence of living things. They move through neuroaesthetics, edible landscapes, and the intertwined beauty of bloom and decay—less as opposites than as conditions a garden sustains simultaneously. What emerges is a philosophy of designing for flux: spaces that are intentional, dynamic, and alive enough for the maker’s hand to recede. Original music and sonic identity by Antfood. Sound design: Federico Casazza. Follow The Russi Hive: YouTube Instagram TikTok Substack

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  Episode #9

  Choghakate Kazarian: Unquicken the Pace — Curating as Medium and Letting Ideas Ripen

  Jun 25, 202649 minS1

  In Episode 9 of The Russi Hive Podcast, Alejandra sits down with Choghakate Kazarian—art historian, curator, and writer—to talk about curating as a creative medium. Kazarian’s story begins in several languages at once: Armenian, French, English, Italian—each one carrying its own atmosphere, its own way of thinking, its own private weather. Born in Armenia, raised in France, and shaped by years of looking across cultures, she speaks about language not as translation, but as a way of seeing. From there, they move into the hidden architecture of exhibition-making: the research, the rhythm, the negotiations with space and loans, and the quiet labor that allows a show to feel inevitable. For Kazarian, the curator’s hand should guide without announcing itself; when an exhibition works, the machinery recedes, and the artist comes more fully into view. They discuss Lucio Fontana, Henry Darger, Louis Michel Eilshemius, the slippery usefulness of labels like outsider art and Art Brut, and Kazarian’s unexpected turn into fashion with her Chloé exhibition at the Jewish Museum. Darger becomes a turning point: after years shaped by Duchamp and other modernist touchstones, Kazarian describes encountering his work as a before-and-after experience—one that unsettled her categories and opened a different way of seeing artistic intensity and necessity. The episode closes with a meditation on time: how ideas ripen, how exhibitions continue after they close, and why slowness can be a form of resistance in a culture obsessed with productivity. Through the work of Albert Pinkham Ryder, Kazarian reflects on revision, unfinishedness, and the delicate discipline of bringing a work to closure without pretending it is ever truly complete. Original music and sonic identity by Antfood. Sound design: Federico Casazza. Follow The Russi Hive: YouTube Instagram TikTok Substack

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  Episode #8

  Scott Asen: The Enemy Is Boredom — Taste, Risk, and Turtle Bay Records

  Jun 11, 202646 minS1

  In Episode 8 of The Russi Hive, Alejandra sits down with Scott Asen: founder of Turtle Bay Records, investor, raconteur, and proof that a life can be organized around taste, mischief, and a highly productive fear of boredom. The interview traces the unlikely arc of a man who grew up with show business in his bloodstream—his mother in vaudeville, his father a clarinet and saxophone player—and then somehow threaded his way through Groton, Harvard, Wall Street, a Cambridge piano bar, private investing, and several lives’ worth of detours. At the center of the episode is Turtle Bay Records, the jazz label Asen founded during the stillness of 2020. What started as a way to record extraordinary musicians playing older jazz has become a larger ecosystem of albums, parties, friendships, music videos, late-night performances, and an elegant excuse to keep very good people in the same room. They talk about the strange usefulness of not fitting in, old New York, and Asen’s Manhattan townhouse, affectionately known in younger circles as the “Jazz Mansion.” The result is a conversation about music, timing, nerve, and the fine art of turning an address into a scene. Original music and sonic identity by Antfood. Sound design: Federico Casazza. Follow The Russi Hive: YouTube Instagram TikTok Substack

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