Radio Commons^™

Failure As Liberation: A Critical Analysis Of Rilo Chmielorz’ Artistic Feature “Scheitern Ist. Eine Bestandsaufnahme” (Failure Is. An Inventory), Ania Mauruschat

RadioDoc Review

This essay is a critical analysis, interpretation and assessment of the feature “Scheitern ist. Eine Bestandsaufnahme”(2016), by the German artist Rilo Chmielorz,which explores failure as a taboo subject in neoliberal societies that worship the ideology of success and progress.

This study deconstructs this unique feature to its various parts and looks at the feature as a whole in terms of the concept of “polyphonic narration” that the Russian literature and art scholar and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) derived from the poetics of the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881). It shows how the level of content (life stories of failure, experts …

Moving, Belonging, And Sorrow In ‘A Very Different Time’ By Phil Smith, Silvia Viñas

RadioDoc Review

Phil Smith’s A Very Different Time weaves poetry, music, ambience and snapshots of stories in an audio piece about movement, nostalgia, change and sorrow. It includes the voices of people he met while living in Berlin: a West African refugee; a musician and academic from the United States; a Syrian refugee escaping war; an academic of Italian/German citizenship; and a German musician who moved from a small town to the city. To this stream of voices, Smith adds layers of music, different beats, street sounds, distortion, the ambience that recall the words – valleys, mountains, water and islands –and a …

Intimate Moments: Dispelling The Cancer Myth With Real Life - Summer Rain By Nanna Hauge Kristensen., Sophie Townsend

RadioDoc Review

Nanna Hauge Kristensen’s Summer Rain is a small piece in length and in scope. It is intimate, almost fragmentary. It is simply a story of a woman, who is a mother, and a daughter, and who has cancer; a woman undergoing treatment, and raising her child, and dealing with the ramifications of what cancer treatment means. An anthropologist by training, Kristensen’s observational, almost distanced approach style, allows us to glimpse her life, but also to feel it. There is something very empirical about what she’s doing in this piece, and she allows us no room to pretend that her cancer …

“Qualia”: The Subjective Qualities Of Sound As Experience Of The Self, Vanessa Ribeiro Rodrigues

RadioDoc Review

How do we construct the perception of the world and Others through sounds? How are we able to express the myriad of feelings inside ourselves into an intelligible structure in order to be understood? What is the amount of interference in the way we express those [translated] feelings? These are some of the subtle questions raised by “Qualia”, a five-episode radio feature by Spanish artist and performer Charo Calvo, aired in 2016 by ABC Radio National’s Soundproof show in Australia.

The name “Qualia” evokes the philosophical theory of an internal and subjective component of sense and mental perceptions, which are …