Xabier Erkizia




audio-lab.org
soinumapa.net
hots-radio.info

NON DIRE (NIENTE) / DON’T SAY (NOTHING)

NON DIRE (niente)

Installation for 3 AM radios, a hacked radio, writing machine, table and 3 channel sound diffusion.
7 sound pieces  + 10 writings (Listening Bulletin)

Sala Santa Rita, ROMA (Italia)
10-22 november, 2015e.
VISITAZIONI, International Sound Art Festival
Curator: Giovanni Antognozzi
With the support of ACE.

>>>> Download the e-book that compiles various documents (in Italian). Courtesy of  LIBE edizioni (PDF + EBUP)
>>>> Download audio documentation (MP3)

 

Radio affects people in a very close way …

Probably is not anything new for us that already know the radio (considering that there is and will be people who have never met the radio). For those who have grown up surrounded by the distorted echoes of radio in the heat of a kitchen or under the privacy of our cars, intimacy is a feeling the emerges without thinking, automatically. The radio has the ability to live at the same time outside and inside, looking in and out at the same time. This is where it keeps the most important part of his magic, a magic that beyond frequencies and amplitudes, is self-generating on each listening experience, unfortunately practiced less and less.

… And it offers a world of communication built from silences between writer-speaker and listener.

In this world without bright images and surrounded by directionless interferences, Marshal McLuhan was right (his is the quote from the beginning) when appointing silence as the mortar used to build the radio. Beyond the topics about radio, as that one that emphasizes the ability to make company, radio as we know it, is a quiet noise machine. The recent move from analogue to digital is a good example of it’s origin: The current radios tune automatically, becoming noise as an interference. However, in old radios were the words and music which interfered between static. Under that ocean of anonymous noise that it seems to tell us that it has been here forever, even before us, beneath the infinite amniotic noise, radio was born. Intimacy and silence.

This work is inspired by the work of the poet, translator and journalist Armand Robin (1912-1961). This French intellectual who lived through two world wars devoted much of his life, first inside the French government and finally as a free-lance, to hear radio broadcasts from many parts of the world. For years, Robin spent whole nights as a what we can call “office (auditorium) spy” which in turn served to make one of the most accurate and critical diagnostics of XX. century propaganda. These notes would later become  in “bulletins d’Ecoute”.

Knowing that these writing are still useful to describe the current media landscape, the exercise in which this installation is based intends to continue with his work. Through tracks and traces obtained from his personal diaries and other writings, the realization of this installation has led me to recover his listening methodology nowadays. I spent whole nights writing notes and recordings made throughout the whole wide dial, trying to discern which forms and directions could take the echoes listened decades ago by Robin in the current context.
Therefore, this installation is primarily based on a dairy, half sound, half written word. A series of listening bulletins.

More information:
http://www.propostesonore.org/indice15-IT.html
http://www.euskara.it