Radio Papesse

When we first initiated Süden Radio, it was almost four years ago in Berlin, we began very naively with a question: what the South sound like? What is it? Is it just a matter of latitude or is it a phenomenon, a method, a cliché, a state of mind as we would have learnt to look at it? A pandora box was open and we tried to navigate these troubled waters by listening to sound productions coming from emerging geographies and grasping diverse perspectives, from sound studies to post-colonial studies.

How can we approach it, without reducing it to a mere geographical term we might use to define ourselves?  Quoting Roberto Dainotto, professor at Duke University, modern European identity begins when the non Europe is internalized, when the South, indeed, becomes the indispensable internal other; still Europe but also the negative part of it. 

But also the multiplicity of the borders, as studied by Sandro Mezzadra, can help us understand on one side the production of a social and cultural South and, on the other, how difficult it is to confine South into geographical borders.

And coming to what we work with, sound, how can we listen to it as it has been establishing itself as a method, a multipolar, multifaceted and complex phenomenon, from which a plurality of voices, perspectives, practices and questions are surfacing?

While listening South, starting from our nearest one, the Mediterranean basin and the African continent, Süden Radio wants to problematize its discourse by acknowledging those sound productions and listening practices that both echo back to the new geo-political and cultural panorama and question the way we listen to reality.

What do we listen to?
What is our position as listeners?
Can sound help us in a process of intercultural translation? 
How can we unlearn through sound?
How can we accept the right to opacity of other places, cultures, human beings through sound?

We have decided to investigate these issues and to open up and share a discourse around them through diverse means: a symposium, a series of workshop and a call for soundworks. 

Süden Radio 
A symposium on the new geographies of sound
April 20th-22nd 2017
Villa Romana
Via Senese 68, Florence

Süden Radio aims to explore and promote practices, radio and sound projects that adopt sound as a critical tool of knowledge, beyond any dominant and clichéd identity or otherness discourse. It is a call to share thoughts around the politics of listening - choreographic, ritual, active, relational, affective and generative; around its value in the socio-cultural-political realm in the Southern Mediterranean region; around the listener’s - and the artist’s - position in space and time as it emerges from the act of listening and recording.

This three-day symposium have gathered practitioners, curators, artists and radio producers in order to address the surfacing and establishment of other geographies of sound from the South of the Mediterranean basin; to use sound to investigate new possible understandings of the world from the perspective of the South; and to explore the radioscapes between aesthetics and politics of transmission and sound as a platform for reappropriation, empowerment and re-territorialization. It also opened up the discourse around the bias, limits and projections of our own investigation. 

Participants | Leandro Pisano, Simone Frangi, Lucrezia Cippitelli, Anna Raimondo, Claudia Wegener, Emeka Ogboh, Fari Bradley, Golo Foellmer, Andrea Borgnino, Chloé Despax, Iain Chambers. 

A Workshop on territorial audiobranding
December 15th, 2016 at Villa Romana. 

Since more than five decades the ways sound affects the perception of space and the sense of place have been at the center of discussions, researches and art practices. Philosophers, ethnologists, artists and musicians among others have dealt with the relations between sound and geographies.

There are many possible ways to tackle this subject and soundscaping practices are at the top of the list, but one perspective we cannot ignore comes not from artistic production but from the commercial and marketing field: audio branding.
To better understand it we decided to investigate the fundamentals of audio branding, its tools and its applications, with a question in mind: how could it be used to explore new readings of a territory?

Together with Filipe Gomes, Daniele Prina  and Fabio Di Santo we explored case histories and best practices.
What is audio branding? how sound design and marketing tools can be used to explore/enhance/question/narrate a place?

Radio Papesse has invited sound artists, radio producers, composers, activists and audio practitioners to participate to the second edition of SÜDEN RADIO, a sound investigation of the South.

By facing the new geographies emerging from a post-global world - in which the borders are as fleeting as the mobility phenomena - the understanding of the world fails whereas it applies monolithic epistemological tools of interpretation to ever-changing subjects and territories. In this scenario, beyond the geographical threshold, the South is establishing itself as a method, a multipolar, polyhedric and complex phenomenon, from which a plurality of voices, perspectives, practices and questions are surfacing. 

We opened a call to share thoughts around the politics of listening - choreographic, ritual, active, relational, affective and generative - around its value in the socio-cultural-political realm in the Southern-Mediterranean region, around the listener’s - and the artist’s - position in space and time as it emerges from the act of listening and recording.

Among the issues we asked artists and producers and practitioners to reflect upon, are:
• the Mediterranean discourse - that is part itself of the entity 'Mediterraneo'
• the personal cartographies as a mean for the re-appropriation of places and memories: when the objectivity of field recording is a chimera
• the circulation and use of archival materials in sound art and experimental audio production.

The shortlisted sound works are: