Kunstradio – the weekly radio art program of the Austrian National Public Radio ORF) presents “Farewell Prayer for one Galiola” by Arsenije Jovanovic. (http://kunstradio.at).
Galiola is the lighthouse at North of Adriatic on a small desert rocky island, far from the mainland, with no inhabitants except thousands of seagulls and lizards, where from time to time I use to spend a day or a night, sometimes longer, often all by myself, years and years while I was sailing around with my boat also named ”Galiola”. As the time went on – this little island and the lighthouse tower became less and less real, both became more my fiction and my obsession than the real thing and started to be a metaphor for all my travels and voyages, the name and an icon on nautical chart more than a real thing. So I am not able any more to explain exactly what Galiola is after all. Exactly is not the word I like anyway. I always enjoyed reading nautical charts and old pilot books, admiring the names of islands and headlands, trying to understand how these beautiful names were created in deep past, more sublime sometimes than the name we are giving to our own children. In the piece „Farewell Prayer for one Galiola“ a choir sings these names like a prayer. A dreamy story dedicated to the little island and its lighthouse, tall thin tower like the stem of the flower looking to the sky.

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

* CFRC 101.9 FM (Kingston, CA)
* CKUT (Montréal, CA)
* free103point9 WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA)
* 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 One 91 FM (Dunedin, NZ)
* Radio Panik (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Papesse (Siena, IT)
* radio x (Frankfurt/Main, DE)
* Rádio Zero (Lisboa, PT)
* RadioWORM (Rotterdam, NL)
* Reboot.fm (Berlin, DE)
* Resonance104.4fm (London, UK)
* Soundart Radio (Dartington, UK)
* TEA FM (Zaragoza, ES)
* XL Air (Brussels, BE)

Affiliates

* Kunstradio (Vienna, AT) More information at http://radia.fm