 |
WE’VE TAKEN THE RADIO |
|
|
Since last season the CASM has hosted the project by Jorge Luis Marzo, Hem pres la ràdio (We’ve Taken the Radio): a contemporary art project that has taken to the airwaves. We’ve Taken the Radio, which occupies various radio programmes and an extensive website from which the different audio files are downloaded, is preparing new proposals for this season. To mark the occasion we are publishing two articles on the project that reflect on the possibilities that radio offers for participation by contemporary art: on the one hand, a text by Pilar Sampietro, director of the programme ‘Nautilus’ on Radio 4, who has talked about and given space to the project on her show, and on the other hand, a text by the art critic and curator Mery Cuesta, who is involved in We’ve Taken the Radio and is especially interested in formulas that can offer art wider cultural dissemination and contact with a broader public.
|
PILAR SAMPIETRO
There are some rare birds in the world of the radio, among whom I count myself, concerned with finding new forms of sound expression. Of course there are not many of us, because lately the medium of radio has had little time for experimentation. The speed and immediacy with which information comes in means you don’t even have ten minutes to think through how to put together a report and what treatment to give it, and the precariousness of working conditions that designs skeleton editorial teams with very few journalists and technicians —the bare minimum or less— does nothing to foster creativity on the airwaves. So it is that the few of us radio hackers that still survive get so enthusiastic about any viable project that promises to shake things up a little. We’ve Taken the Radio, a project conceived by Jorge Luis Marzo, is an experiment of precisely this kind. If the art world of the 21st century is beginning to be characterized by the diversity of techniques and media at the disposal of artistic expression, the medium of radio should also be a platform in the service of the artist, as Marzo has very clearly understood. Radio 4 is a public station that has for some time now, within the scope of its possibilities, been actively open to ‘unconventional’ projects of this kind as a contribution to the ‘holding operations’ that typically occupy the dial here in Catalonia.
|
|
|
|
|
| Radio Lamáspopular, by Taniel Morales, Mataró Beach, summer 2006 |
|
|
|
Rebeca. The passion for grants
Right from the first episode, broadcast as part of the programme Nautilus,of Guillermo Trujillano’s fiction project entitled Rebeca. Pasión de becas it became clear that it was possible to disprove once and for all the conventional wisdom that radio can have nothing to say about contemporary art. The way of doing so was to reach the listener with a simple form, as a radio drama, but one that concealed within it a whole series of concepts with which to analyse the current situation in the creative arts. The protagonist, the artist Antoni Abad, threatens to commit suicide by leaping from the top of the Torre Agbar if he does not get the grant he needs to carry out his latest project. There are three strokes of genius in the basic storyline and its staging. First, the fact that it is the real-life artist who plays himself in the story; this lends it extra credibility, while at the same time parodying the extreme plot twists typical of the classic radio dramas of the 1960s and present-day Latin-American TV soaps. Second, the fact that the principal location is that paradigm of architectonic modernity, the Torre Agbar, designed by Jean Nouvel and situated in the 22@ district, a place of contrasts and coincidences, in that over the last twenty years the old warehouses of this area —Poble Nou— have also provided many Barcelona artists with affordable studio space. Not for nothing is it the home of Hangar and of the Associació d’Artistes Visuals. But it also so happens that the area has witnessed the demolitions of the warehouse-workshops, and this has drawn attention to the lack of available spaces for creative activities in the city. The most recent episode has been the to-do over the squatters in La Makabra and Can Ricart.
Third, the fact things have reached the extreme of committing artistic suicide for the sake of a grant. This is a also a condemnation of the institutional vices of an art circuit that privileges only those chosen few creative talents in receipt of funding. We broadcast the radio drama weekly, with a new episode every Wednesday, starting with a résumé of the last episode and ending on a moment of suspense to build up an appetite for the next broadcast. Both Guillermo Trujillano and Jorge Luis Marzo are people who like to parody their own work and their condition as artist and curator.
Radio Paca. Women on the air.
The thing that our culture team at Radio 4 finds most fascinating is that it should be the artists themselves that are not only showing that it’s possible to talk about contemporary art on the radio, but that they are able to create in and with the medium and actively engage the listener.
The Radio Paca initiative, which followed on from the Trujillano soap opera and occupied the whole summer, has served to confirm the great possibilities the medium can have in the hands of the collectives that exist in the city: in this case, a radio created by women that allows them to use sound as a form of expression. Radio Paca held its early sessions in the Francesca Bonnemaison women’s centre. The content not only actively favoured the airing of women’s voices but also let them explain, in the first person, the situations of those that, for one reason or another, have been obliged to leave their native land and make a place for themselves in the collective life of Barcelona. Radio Paca has a positive therapeutic effect for women who need to share experiences and get to know other situations that can help them deal with their own troubles.
And now we have artistic expression in the form of the brief slots of around five minutes that sum up Radio Paca’s weekly programme, with a few seconds for each collective, linked together in an innovative way by Lilia and Marcela, the instigators of the project. It has to be said that Radio Paca has also been through difficult moments, especially last summer when there were some tense exchanges with the women’s centre. The workshop that we immediately organized at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, and broadcast full information about on Nautilus, gave Radio Paca the time to create a new space to broadcast from, with the website www.radiopaca.net
Sala dos
We are now installed in the sound exhibition rooms of the Gràcia-based collective Experimentem amb l’art, or more precisely, they have occupied part of our premises, but we are happy for it to be that way and to have them appear every Wednesday in different sections of the programme. Their project, Radio SIS, created by Juan Antonio Delgado and David Armengol, is a walk through a virtual gallery in which the sound is the protagonist, and is divided into the classic sections |
of a radio programme. The result is surprising, above all for the richness of the soundscape in each of its issues. It is also remarkable in expressing the sensations and experiences of the people of Gràcia, captured by ordinary people who have borrowed a microphone for a day and gone out to record sounds. So you might have the sounds of a cafeteria, or of the rain, or the street sounds at a certain time of day on carrer Torrijos, where Experimentem amb l’art is based. And we are aware that in a not-too-distant future the sound experience of the district of Gràcia will be a new element in the work of the project.
Special mention must be made of the work that Ràdio SIS has been doing at the Ràdio Gràcia station: ‘Sala U’ features projects as unusual for the medium as ‘a minute of silence’, something that in conventional radio is regarded as a mortal sin. And what do we achieve with this? Neither more nor less than proposing a new way of engaging with art, with its exhibition spaces laid out like a radiophonic space, simply waiting to be listened to. |
|
|
|
 |
|
| Radio Lamáspopular, by Taniel Morales, Gràcia, summer 2006 |
|
|
|
|
|
“The thing that our culture team at Radio 4 finds most fascinating is that the artists themselves that are not only showing that it’s possible to talk about contemporary art on the radio, but that they can create in the medium.”
|
|
Mapas del Nuevo Mundo / Maps of the New World
We still have Taniel Morales to go. We will be spending the winter months with him and their his Mexican sonority. Apart from the presenters at Radio Paca, Taniel Morales is the only artist in the project who is really familiar with the medium, thanks to his professional radio experience in his native Mexico. The fact that he refers to himself as a ‘radiophonist’ says a great deal about a creator who is equally at home with a music performance and a sound sculpture. His Maps of the New World are a product of the work he did at Can Xalant in Mataró in the course of a very fruitful residential workshop during May and June of last year. The sounds he offers trace out new territories of the microstory, thanks to a kind of network that steadily extends its radius to reveal the social and multicultural links of Barcelona. The working process is wonderfully simple: you take part in the Radio Arte project and recommend two friends, each of whom in turn proposes two more, and so on to infinity. Taniel has asked each of these people to draw a map of the city and pick out five significant places, as well as memories, music and objects. We have already appreciated that the action is by no means confined to these sound treats that Taniel Morales offers us, and as a result the overall project We’ve Taken the Radio has been expanded to include workshops, presentations of the projects, concerts and public debates, as well as educational activities. All of these experiences can be followed on various wavelengths, including Radio 4, of course, and also on the Internet at www.hempreslaradio.net.
Cassasses says: ‘We’re asleep? We are very wide awake, and conscious as we are that the artists have taken the radio, we are all the more motivated to see that this functions like a slap on the back of the listener’s neck, so that he is suddenly shaken awake and says, “Hey! This is radio, too.” Of course it is! And necessary!’ |
|
|
