Listening to the World—100 Years of Radio Art, Pt. 2

Listening to the World—100 Years of Radio Art takes the 100 year anniversary of Radio Art in Germany as an opportunity to inquire radio and listening as global phenomena with visible and invisible worldwide connections.

On 19 October 2024, the multiformat programme presents perspectives and practices from Southern Africa and other geographically, politically, and sonically related areas. In the process of studying the role of radio broadcasting in Southern Africa one is invited to ask existential questions, such as: What can radio broadcasting provide today? How can the medium be used to intervene artistically? And in which areas and from which perspective?

Through these questions, attention shifts towards mechanisms of different knowledge production systems that shape and define the interpretations of radio both as technology and cultural entity. In many people’s experience, acts of listening are intertwined with acts of remembering: sound can function as a form of memory. In the aforementioned regions, this manifests as creative rituals that carry a plethora of subjective and political meaning. This programme considers these acts of listening as operating from and within a background of colonial trauma. How can radio both as technology and cultural medium facilitate a reappraisal and amplify its healing effect?

The encounters focussing on these questions are hosted in a 12-hour live radiophonic exchange involving communities and radio stations in Cape Town, Harare, and Berlin. This live platform, broadcasted in and from HKW via the experimental radio station Cashmere Radio in Berlin, provides a chance to test collective commitments on listening towards global justice, addressing colonially fractured practices of listening. How can the already existing processes of healing—through formats such as Radio Art for instance—be identified? How can communities be fostered through radiophonic exchange beyond national borders?

The sound medium and the spirit medium (healer) share a common ability: to transcend imposed boundaries and fixed geographies, bringing together disparate elements from ‘elsewhere’ as a transformative methodology. How can acts of listening in the current historical moment evoke Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s concept of re-membering—a magnetic pull gathering the scattered and broken parts of the African being?

According to Tsitsi Ella Jaji’s concept of stereomodernism, it was via sound that a global Black feeling was distributed from the 1960s as African countries attained independence. The Black Atlantic pan-African sonic space also emerged and evolved through sound and music, uniting continental Africans, Caribbeans, African Americans, and the broader diaspora in thought, feeling, and cultural expression. A form of sonic healing through re-membering lay at the heart of this transnational movement. What significance does collective listening hold when people gather around a radio and engage with ‘elsewhere’? And what can be achieved through moments of collective listening and remembering?