Radia Show 1014: "Bratislava - Voices of Freedom" by Gjorgji Janevski (Kanal 103)

Against the backdrop of Slovakia’s terrifying socio-political turmoil, this documentary radio piece explores Bratislava’s vibrant and courageous independent music and cultural scene and some of the community spaces in which it develops. Now they are facing their biggest challenge, to keep it alive and kicking.

We’ve been there (for the bad parts mostly), and we are still stuck there.

From Skopje to Bratislava, with love.

…

Recorded and edited by Gjorgji Janevski (summer 2024)
Additional interviews and recordings by Vid Bešter (Radio Študent)

Voices: Jonáš Gruska, Matúš Kobolka, Adela Mede, Poli, Daniel Vadas, Janneke Van Der Putten, Oliver from the garages, Olja Triaška Stefanović, Rozalia Vlaskova, Tomaš Hučko.

Music excerpts from Adela Mede, Bolka, Jonáš Gruska, Fissures, Patrick Balthrop, Rrrr

The publication of this article is part of PERSPECTIVES – the new label for independent, constructive, multiperspective journalism. The project PERSPECTIVES is being implemented by seven editorial teams from Central Eastern Europe under the leadership of the Goethe-Institut. The author of this article participated in the PERSPECTIVES Journalists-in-Residence Programme at the Goethe-Institut Bratislava.

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: 17 partners in nine countries and growing all the time.

Radia Stations

* Campus Paris (Paris, FR)
* CFRC 101.9 FM (Kingston, CA)
* CKUT (Montréal, CA)
* JET FM (Nantes, FR)
* Kanal 103 (Skopje, MK)
* Orange 94.0 (Vienna, AT)
* Radio Campus (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Corax (Halle, DE)
* Radio Grenouille (Marseille, FR)
* Radio Helsinki (Graz, AT)
* Radio Nova (Oslo, NO)
* Radio One 91 FM (Dunedin, NZ)
* Radio Panik (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Papesse (Firenze, IT)
* Radio Student (Ljubljana, SI)
* radio x (Frankfurt/Main, DE)
* Rádio Zero (Lisboa, PT)
* RadioWORM (Rotterdam, NL)
* Reboot.fm (Berlin, DE)
* Resonance FM (London, UK)
* Soundart Radio (Dartington, UK)
* TEA FM (Zaragoza, ES)
* Wave Farm WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA)
* XL Air (Brussels, BE)

Affiliates

* Kunstradio (Vienna, AT)

More information at http://radia.fm