Radia Show 1110: Freeze, Asian Archive by Avita Maheen (Radio Worm)

Freeze, Asian Archive documents the immigrant neighbourhood stretching from West Kruisplein to Mathenesserplein in Rotterdam. Starting from the East Asian shops and restaurants often known as Rotterdam’s Chinatown, this 2.3 km street extends into a mix of Asian and other non-European grocery stores, restaurants, small businesses, and third spaces, representing communities from East, South, Southeast, and West Asia, as well as South America, Africa, and former Dutch colonies. Immigrants often carry with them an image of home from the time they left. As they recreate these spaces abroad, they become time capsules where the past is preserved through visually through the interiors and sonically through the music playing inside. In November 2025, I walked this street and recorded the music playing in different Asian and Non-European grocery stores and restaurants. This soundwalk is a homage to the moments of time that remain frozen through migration and displacement.

Bio: Avita Maheen (aka two4.41139) is a Bangladeshi sound, performance, media artist, writer, and curator based in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Her practice is centered on sound, memory and she authored the framework titled the embryonic desire, with autoethnographic research on personal and urban influences of globalization in post-millenium Bangladeshi urban music culture. Maheen is the founder of Kalponik Rekha and Chaya Chobi, platforms for South Asian experimental sound art and ambient cinema, and is a guest Adjunct Faculty at Pathshala South Asian Media Institute.

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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.

Radia Stations

* Duuu (Paris, FR)

* ∏node (Mulhouse, Paris, FR)

* Diffusion (Sydney, AU)

* JET FM (Nantes, FR)

* Kanal 103 (Skopje, MK)

* Orange 94.0 (Vienna, AT)

* Radio Campus (Brussels, BE)

* Radio Grenouille (Marseille, FR)

* Radio Helsinki (Graz, AT)

* 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)

* Usmaradio (San Marino, SM)

* Wave Farm WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA)

Affiliates

* Kunstradio (Vienna, AT)

* Mobile Radio (Ürzig, DE)

* Rádio Zero (Lisboa, PT)

* Radioart106 (Haifa, PS48)

Syndicated By

* Campus Paris (Paris, FR)

* Harrogate Community Radio (North Yorkshire, UK)

* KZradio (Tel Aviv, IL)

* Noise Radio (Zwolle, NL)

* Radio ARA (Luxembourg, LU)

More information at http://radia.fm