«El Caldo/The Broth» – Noís Radio and Doña Ola [CO] at Gessnerallee [CH]

With its new management team (Michelle Akanji, Rabea Grand and Juliane Hahn), the Gessnerallee (Zurich) divided from September 2020 its season into 6-week cycles of which each member of the team of international co-curators (Catalina Insignares, Lhaga Koondhor, Marc Streit and Pankaj Tiwari) will be in charge respectively. For the third cycle of the 2020-2021 season, Catalina Insignares proposed a 6-week program under the name «El Caldo/The Broth». «El Caldo/The Broth» wanted to make visible the tools that allow us and have allowed us to be united while being separated. Oceanic crossings, dissolutions of communities, more or less self-imposed diasporas. In the midst of ruptures with their places or communities, in the midst of deaths on one side, on the other or in the middle of the high seas, humans and non-humans have been able to maintain communications and contacts through waves, spores, winds, telepathies.

Invited by Catalina, one of the two collectives from South America is Noís Radio [CO], which investigates the worlds of migration in Zurich and connects it to the worlds that open up every week in the Gessnerallee. During their stay, they performed a radio series that mixed storytelling, lectures, soundscape and interviews with live performative actions. They used a fictional story that articulated the different sound, performative, audiovisual or plastic interventions, within a live radio show inspired by epic journeys and imagined cartography.

The second collective, Doña Ola [CO], investigated the task of what it means to cross the Atlantic in the most literal way possible. They embody the real temporality of that crossing by transmitting and recording from an ocean liner, linking the Switzerland-Colombia poles. The journey became the time-space to touch and interact with other lives, trajectories and sounds in the Atlantic, aboard an experimental radio boat. The theater lived in the boat and the boat in the theater, making the time of the crossing palpable in the bodies of the artists and in the radio waves.

Also participating in «El Caldo/The Broth»: Myriam Lefkowitz and Simon Ripoll-Hurier (France), Camila Marambio and the Ensayos collective (Chile, United States, Norway, Australia), Jota Mombaça (Brazil/Germany], Loup (France), MPA (United States), Carolina Mendonça (Brazil/Belgium).

ABOUT THE COLLECTIVES 

Noís Radio 

Noís Radio is a collective interested in exploring the everyday sound universes and creating radio experiences. It was born in Cali in 2009 and since then its work has focused on the production of live radio programs that mix the sound landscape with voices, music and performative actions. They also carry out collective listening exercises through walks and guided tours, activities in which the sound experience is essential because it is a game of sensory and material possibilities to connect memories, impressions, dreams and concerns about the environment and everyday events. In addition, to create and accompany networks or communities around the exercise of radio that can be sustained over time and that contribute to the exercise of generating strategies to create, disseminate, and save the memory of the communities. Natalia Santa Restrepo, César Torres Romero, Nathaly Espitia Diaz, María Juliana Soto Narváez and Stephanie López Barona participate in Noís Radio.   

Doña Ola 

And from Medellín, a creative radio couple, Maritza Sánchez Hernández and Edy Giraldo Jaramillo, get together to collaborate on different projects; for this specific one, they have named themselves Doña Ola, evoking a trip to the Pacific, where this whole journey began to germinate. Part of their joint work can be seen in recent creations within the collective Manzana Radio and ATradio where experimentation in sound formats appears. The construction of parallel universes that question the systems of functioning of the world and reality, and that propose paths of thought to other possible, improbable, undreamed-of worlds.