CTM Radio Lab was seeking two projects through an open call for entries. The jury selected "Transformation" from a record number of 220 proposals from 47 countries for the 2021 CTM Festival theme. The festival decided to take the social, ecological and political inequalities on our planet, which can no longer be denied due to the Corona crisis, as an opportunity to deal intensively with global dependencies as well as individual and collective fragility.

The CTM Radio Lab is an initiative of Deutschlandfunk Kultur - Klangkunst and CTM Festival with the Goethe-Institut, Ö1 Kunstradio and ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst with the support of the British music magazine The Wire. The call is open to artists from all over the world in the fields of experimental music, sound art, radio art, new radio play and performance. The works should address the annual theme of the CTM Festival and encourage a project between radio art and live concert or installation art, and allow for a radio version of 40-55 minutes in length.

The selected projects illuminate the theme of transformation from a variety of perspectives and chose different approaches. On the one hand, an artist collective invited volunteers to imagine and embody non-human identities for the live role-playing game "Otherkin - A Social Software." On the other hand, Indonesian-born artist Riar Rizaldi developed the "sonic-fiction" radio play "The Right to Do Nothing/Hak Untuk." In it, he lets listeners participate in the lives of migrant workers in Hong Kong in an unspecified future.

Otherkin - A Social Software von Omsk Social Club x Alexander Iezzi x Sarah Johanna Theurer

Otherkin - A Social Software« is a role-played experimental radio performance that takes place through the lens of a fiction theory narrative centred around the idea of Otherkin and the notion of companion species – human beings entangled with other animals, organisms, landscapes, and technologies. The work aims to bring up questions of new animism, translocality, and why it is so important to leave behind the outdated notion of human exceptionalism.

The Right to Do Nothing / Hak Untuk Malas von Riar Rizaldi

»The Right to do Nothing« is a sonic-fiction about non-productive time, a story of Indonesian domestic migrant workers in Hong Kong who are trapped in an ultraterrestrial dimension where the situation between productivity and non-productivity is reversed. In this place, migrant workers receive their wages by being unproductive—they are paid to sleep and »nongkrong« (an Indonesian word that literally means »sitting around because there is nothing to do« or »hanging out because you’re not doing any work«).

Community radio mushroomed in Indonesia after the fall of military dictatorship in 1998. Most of these initiatives were run by labour unions that broadcast labour rights and radio dramas, promoting revolutionary literature and theories on syndicalism, as well as a mix of hybrid music from speed funkot to indigenous bamboo music. Inspired by the second generation of Indonesian labour community radio, such as the women worker-run Marsinah FM, »The Right to do Nothing / Hak Untuk Malas« is a reflection of the transformation of community radio, which for decades has been part of the aesthetic experience of nonproductivity for migrant workers in Hong Kong; a friend of their free time in Sunday when hanging out in the harbour listening to the series of radio (melo)drama and mix of eclectic sounds while »nongkrong.«

With »The Right to Do Nothing / Hak Untuk Malas,« musician and filmmaker Riar Rizaldi presents an experience of the world where nonproductivity blooms and where the sense of time is not reduced to a mechanical clock, through an imaginary soundscape of a place without work.

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