Radia Po B. K. Lomami The House Of Kinshasa Part 1 (CKUT)
The House of Kinshasa – Part 1 by Po B. K. Lomami This is the outcome of a WhatsApp call between my parents in Belgium and me in Canada about the final chapter of their house in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They recalled how two Zairean Ph.D. students, who just met in Brussels, decided to buy a house in Kinshasa without seeing it. They bought a home to prepare for their return to Zaire/DR Congo together after their academic program. The return never happened. Now retired, they just sold the house 36 years later. The house my brothers and I never grew up in is gone. Like any call with my parents, I learned about way more than what I asked for. It is a snippet of the experiences and trajectories of the Congolese diaspora of their generation in Belgium. It is also a glimpse of how I experienced it as their child who left that same Belgium as soon as they could. The House of Kinshasa is a five-part sound project about the diasporic realities of transmission, return, and housing for a family spread over DR Congo, Belgium, and Canada. In this first part, I intertwine my parents’ story with my perspective, field recordings, and bits of CKUT’s archive. With the participation of my mother and my father. Audio sources from CKUT’s archive include (in order): Café. CKUT, 24 Jun 2022 “Child presentation.” Homelessness Marathon 2005. CKUT, 11 Jan 2005 “Origins of the XX Files.” XX Files. CKUT, 25 May 2016 “Economic Empowerment.” Black Talk. CKUT, 31 Jan 1992 “Roundtable Discussion on Black Identity as Immigrants to Canada.” CKUT, n.d. “Diana Sharpe Interviews Prof. Joel Harder and Analyzes the Lumber Situation in Congo.” Amandla. CKUT, 2007 “Roberta Bondar, Canadian astronaut, Discovery Space Shuttle.”, CKUT, n.d. Black Talk. CKUT, 1991, cassette side B Po B. K. Lomami (Pauline Batamu Kasiwa Lomami) is a self-taught undisciplinary artist, art administrator, and artistic and public programmer. They are a Congodescendant from Belgium currently based in Tiohtià:ke-Mooniyang-Montreal. Exploring Afrofuturist principles and methodologies, Lomami’s art practice revolves around the displacement of work, the becoming of their subjectivity, and the possible collective futures with black, crip, queer and Afrofeminist perspectives. https://pobklomami.art

Each week one member of the Radia Network produce 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