The Radia Network: New and forgetten ways of making radio.

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“False beginner”

By Anna Raimondo from Radio Grenouille.

Alors… the Italian as a field… hmmm… of roots. As a thread that ties your own life up, an engine of memories and hidden emotions.

The Italian language course as a game. Languages that run one after another, overlapping each other, recalling themselves in an attempted translation, just like Naples and Marsiglia soundscapes emerging from memoirs of Monique’s, Therese’s, Vivianne’s childhood. All of them are pensioner over sixty, living in Marseilles, with Italian origins. Also meet Flore, Danielle and Eliane that present themselves in the street with their translated names Fiore, Daniela and Eliana. Immersion in a soup based on Italian, Neapolitan and French, where to find right gender concordance and how to get the right pronunciation.

The Italian class is not a psychoanalytic session. Yet, speaking Italian gives form to a carnal relation with language, to the childhood memories of “le Panier” known as the “Petite Naples”, and of “la Cabucelle”, two districts in Marseilles that are “really like Italy”. A dream of Italy, warm, sunny and sublimated. Defined sometimes as babi, spaghetti or ritals, French people with Italian roots are beginners, false beginners, or advanced…. “False beginner” is something like faked beginner, maybe the feeling we have when we speak a second language; maybe the society’s condition with migration’s phenomenon… “False beginner” is a show based on binaural recordings in Naples’s Quartieri spagnoli and in Panier and Cabucelle districts, recordings in different Italian classes, interviews and dialogues in public spaces.

"Fruitcake"

By Cheyenne and Calypso, Soundart Radio Totnes.

The title of "Fruitcake" evokes a lost world of English teatime, as well as the mixed up and unpredictable nature of this piece. Produced by two teenage girls as a response to growing up in a quiet but strange Moorland town in the South West of England, "Fruitcake" contains a blend of interviews with older residents of the town, dramatised sections set in an imagined 1950's community, improvised music and a bit of giggling and mucking about. In their words: "We've been cutting and pasting and things. Basically our story is about two friends growing up in the 1950s in Buckfastleigh. It's a very hearwarming tale of joy and friendship. And it's sad and it's lovely and you'll love the people in it. You will laugh and you will cry and you will make new friends in this amazing world of Buckfastleigh. Come and visit us. We're not a bit crazy."

Radia is a network of independent radio stations who have a common interest in promoting and producing artworks for the radio, and in forming related projects based on broadcasting and cultural exchange. We produce a weekly radio show that is broadcast by each of the member radio stations. Our shows represent the local artistic community of each station, whilst at the same time these new works point to an emergent collective notion of self-determined art for radio.

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