It’s the economic one.
The economic trip.

radia_s57_n1102_ Le voyage économique
Radio Grenouille

Un trajet
Des questions

Quelle différence entre métro et avion ?
Entre un centre commercial et un aéroport ?
Que nous dit l’énergie lumineuse et les vrombissements de ces déplacements mécaniques ?

2364 mètres au-dessus du sol. Boire une gorgée d’eau, à 4901 mètres du sol ;
« Voulez-vous un jus de pomme, pepsi, café ? Du lait, du sucre ? »
Ça se passe tous les jours.

Il y a des moineaux dans l’aéroport d’Istanbul. Sur les arbres.
Sur les arbres qui sont en pot, DANS le terminal de l’aéroport.
Un peuple d’oiseau en cage, entouré d’oiseaux de métal, qui eux, volent haut.

Qui m’a autorisé à prendre leur place ?
C’est l’économique.
Le voyage économique.

Each week one member of the Radia Network produces a show for all the others. The Radia Network emerged from a series of meetings, clandestine events, late-night club discussions, and a lot of email exchanges between cultural radio producers across Europe. The topics vary and the reasons for forming a network are many, but Radia has become a concrete manifestation of the desire to use radio as an art form. The approaches differ, as do the local contexts; from commissioned radio art works to struggles for frequencies to copyright concerns, all the radios share the goal of an audio space where something different can happen. That different is also a form in the making––radio sounds different in each city, on each frequency. Taking radio as an art form, claiming that space for creative production in the mediascape and cracking apart the notion of radio, is what Radia does.

It is producing radio stuff that is hard to describe. Some of it can be labeled radio art, or experimental radio, or creative radio. Sometimes it talks, sometimes it doesn’t. It can be noisy, or a kind of soundscape, or a documentary, a document, a talk, a performance. Each and every week, one of the partners will provide the network program, commissioned and produced especially for this purpose: being broadcast by all the partners and made available online.

Some things have to be said about all those partners. They are radio stations, of the independent, non-commercial, community, cultural species. They all speak different languages, and this should create interesting problems. Although initially they were all European radio stations this has changed over time, and Radia has become not only larger but also more diverse: 22 partners in 14 countries and growing all the time.