As often, politics and economics are inseparable, and as corruptive mechanisms become more obvious, both reveal deep submergence into necropolitics. A capital cumulation on the detriment of basic social rights leading to a radical devaluation of a human life. To cut the story short, most of the “modern” societies “background” economics can be reduced to arms sales, drugs, and human trafficking routes. Beneath them are stock value of oil and lithium, gold and diamonds.
Radiophrenia 2022 – part two
Nothing Has To Happen, Fortress Europe by Manja Ristic
PLAY
from home to lowcountry by claire rousay
PLAY
Statement by Mark Vernon
PLAY
|
Radiophrenia is a temporary art radio station broadcasting intermittently from the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow – a two-week long festival exploring current trends in sound and transmission arts. The broadcast schedule includes a series of 19 newly commissioned radio works, 13 Live-to-Air performances as well as live studio shows, shorts and pre-recorded features. As in previous years, the majority of the program is made up from selections submitted to an international open call for sound art and radio works. Four of the newly commissioned radio works are co-produced with ORF Kunstradio, and in return five Kunstradio productions are included in the Radiophrenia festival program. Nothing Has To Happen, Fortress Europe 
In January 2020 I found myself in Ljubljana exploring abandoned spaces as a continuation of my obsession with listening to the Third Landscape – Gilles Clément’s concept which considers, among other things, abandoned urban landscapes or those which suffered an explicit human intervention as places good for thriving bio-diversities which are building the genetic reservoirs that an overall Ecosystem is dependant on. I instantly got hooked by the largest city project – The Sport Park Stožice. It was supposed to include sport facilities and a vast commercial area but only the public part was built, the arena and the stadium. Eighty thousand square meters of the shopping centre remained unfinished. “Please be careful, you’ll be trespassing”, said a dear friend. The private partner in the public-private largest investment in Slovenia since the 1970s went bankrupt in 2012. There were irregularities in the expenditure of EU funds, the then-Mayor pleads not guilty in the latest lawsuit investigating the case. “There used to be a wonderful pond, and a hilly landscape… now it’s just concrete, wherever you look, there’s concrete.” It was a crispy January morning, I wore my army boots. The site was enormous. Several concrete terraces were covered in various surfaces, reaching as far as the eye can see. I decided to just walk. people were falling in the streets shivering in agony, for what they saw would hit them like a bolt, scalding them from within, the Great War was now inside them A few days before, I was waiting in line at a crowded ticket office at the Belgrade bus station, when two 16-year-old boys approached me for help. They were trying to reach a certain newly established migrant camp in Bosnia but they claimed that the lady behind the counter refused to sell them tickets. So I got into an argument with her, when she finally shouted at me, “The camp is not in that town, it’s in this one, and there is no bus to there, they mixed up the names! You almost sent them in the wrong direction! Anyway, they are completely confused”. I looked at her not hiding my concern about the two boys and I mumbled “...you would be confused too after reaching here on foot all the way from Afghanistan”. I took the boys aside, made several phone calls with friends who are journalists and human rights activists, and found them the route to that camp, knowing that I'm only sending them to an even greater uncertainty and potential danger, because the closer you get to the border with the EU the uglier it gets. People migrating from the Middle East and Africa spend years in the remote Balkan forests constantly dealing with severe weather, hunger, exhaustion, sickness, violent pushbacks by border police, a landscape full of land mines from ex-Yu wars. They have to face people smugglers and traffickers, and local neo Nazis that proudly call themselves human head hunters. Passing the part of the Balkan route closer to the border with the EU they call The Game. Sometimes, after years in the deadly forests, they manage to reach Slovenia and then get violently pushed back or deported. An Iranian single mother of two was illegally pushed back from the Croatian border 22 times over a period of 2 years. In the end, local people in the little border town stood up and hid them, until they found a way to get lawyers, national media and trustworthy immigration officers to help her. She was asking for her legal right to gain an asylum. your voice bounces within narrow memories, leaks down the carvings of space – shame is taped to the frost, limbs darken in the harsh Belgrade winter. blood trails in the snow lead to the great house of despair, as there were different deaths for them and us, for them and them, for us alone. I was walking across the derelict construction site thinking about those two boys, about Madina, a six year old Afghan girl struck by a train on the border between Serbia and Croatia after being pushed back in the middle of the night by the Croatian police. “Follow the tracks” they ordered. The family was on the road for two years. I was thinking about people losing limbs from unexploded land mines in Bosnian forests. I was thinking about war profiteers in the Balkans, how they found a way to gain immunity for their economic crimes through involvement in politics. About the twisted minds running EU member states and building border camps for people on the migrant route that look no different than concentration camps. I was thinking about the dark heart of Europe swallowing lives, unstoppably. And the Fortress I was walking on was barren, derelict and intoxicated. Swollen by greed. Cold and deadly. still landscape soaked & burgeoning the rainbow is piercing lead horizon flashed by the beams of fleeting Sun as it was posing above meadows, hills & forests for the greatest collodion photo curled up dog is sleeping in a derelict bus stop soon the night will fall and the migrants will roam by the dark highway wet to the bones Every time you think “That is somewhere over there. Nothing has to happen”, a child that dreamed of freedom disappears. __ from home to lowcountry 
“from home to lowcountry documents a solo journey from my home in San Antonio to one of my favorite local bars, Lowcountry. This journey was originally documented as an unaltered field recording. Later, I decided to record an accompaniment to this field recording that included piano, organ, vocal samples, and various other electronics. The accompaniment acts as an emotional compass that guides the listener through my 36 minutes journey from home's front door to the patio bar.” |
