Radio Papesse

A soundwork produced by Anna Raimondo for Radio Grenouille. Here is how the artist introduces the work herself:

"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."