Transmission
Audio art installation
In Radio Alice: Linguaggi e Creativita’, Ex Ospedale Psichiatrico Roncati, Bologna, 2017
Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance. Something that is constituted here resonates with the shock wave emitted by something constituted over there. An insurrection is not like a plague or a forest fire — a linear process which spreads from place to place after an initial spark. It rather takes the shape of a music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythms of their own vibrations, always taking on more density. (The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection)
The audio artwork Transmission was part of the group show Radio Alice: Linguaggi e Creativita’, organised by Valerio Minnella and Nino Iorfino, on the 40th anniversary of the closure, in March 1977, of the free radio station Radio Alice by the armed police forces during the youth uprising and violent clashes which followed the killing by the Carabinieri of the student Francesco Lo Russo. During the commemoration event in remembrance of Lo Russo on 11 March 2027, thousands of students gathered and marched in protest in the streets of Bologna,, chanting the 1977 movement slogan ‘Francesco e’ vivo, e lotta insieme a noi (Francesco is alive and fights with us).
The installation soundscape is a reshape/remix of Radio Alice archival recordings, provided by Valerio Minnella, a founder of the radio. The assemblage includes fragments from the radio’s live transmissions and night-time tapes, and the sounds of its final transmission, with the voice of Valerio broadcasting live during the armed police break-in which led to his arrest and the forced closure of the radio in March 1977. These archival sources, traced and dubbed, formed the basis for a layered composition comprising voices, electronic sounds, earth atmospherics, radio astronomy material, and field recordings from the 2017 commemoration march, to evoke a sense of personal memory, deep time, and present resonance.
What are the resonances of Radio Alice and the 1977 movement in the present?
The collective Wu Ming described the radio as such: ‘Radio Alice was one of the most singular and original experiments on language and communication that ever took hold in Italy. Lacking a proper newsroom and even less a programme schedule, the Bologna broadcaster made spontaneity and linguistic contamination something more than just a flag to wave. It was a project where political, artistic and existential petitions blended in the common denominator of radio space.’
And this is how Bifo, one the key contributors of Radio Alice, described the resonance of the 1977 movement. ‘From the point of view of its conclusion, the movement of ’77 appears as such: a lucid understanding of the exhaustion of modernity, a lucid understanding of the fact that capitalism—a system of destruction of the human, of absorption and perversion of intelligence and creativity—doesn’t have any alternative left. At that point begun the crossing of the desert which isn’t finished yet.’ (Francesco Berardi ‘Bifo’, Settantasette: La rivoluzione che viene)
Dialogue with Valerio Minnella, 11 March 2017
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