RADIO SCHIZOANALYTIQUE:
transmissions from the fold

SAVVY Contemporary is happy to be collaborate with Radio Schizoanalytique: A Discursive Radio Event by Angela Anderson and Angela Melitopoulos which takes the anti-mining movement in Halkidiki, Northern Greece, against the “low-cost” Canadian gold mining company Eldorado Gold as a starting point to unfold a multi-layered critical perspective on extractivism and to propose alternative, sustainable futures.

Radio Schizoanalytique is a mobile radio station conceived as a tool to foster the means of expression and internal communication within this political struggle, distributing their voices beyond their local community and to creating a living history of the movement. Activists from the Committee of Struggle against Gold Mining from the village of Megali Panagia, Halkidiki, Greece, have been producing transmissions for Radio Schizoanalytique since March, 2015.

This free radio folds diverse matters of knowledge into group discussions, taking in the existential understandings of territory, the dynamic flux and flows of resources, the machines at work, and the cultural universes and cosmologies expressed by the movement and its environment. These four aspects of radio schizoanalytique are inspired by Félix Guattari’s notion of schizo-analysis.

The struggle against the Skouries gold mine began already in 2006, with European Goldfields’ scandalous take over of the Cassandra mining concessions. In 2011, with the price of gold at a record high, the Greek government illegally approved the environmental impact statement for the Skouries open pit mine. European Goldfields was taken over by Eldorado Gold in 2012, facilitated by the European Union’s “fast track” investment program forced on Greece as a result of the debt crisis. Eldorado Gold is one of the most contested capital investors in Greece because of the brutal de facto political, economic and environmental situation they force onto the population in Halkidiki.

If allowed to proceed, Eldorado Gold will extract 380 million tons of earth from the Skouries open pit mine, releasing 4.3 tons of fine dust containing high concentrations of heavy metals into the air every hour over the next 25 years, asphyxiating the remaining plants and leading to the desertification of the forest. Hundreds of thousands of trees have already been cut and the water resources of the region have been disrupted, some of which are already showing signs of arsenic contamination due to the current mining activity.

The economic and ecological costs of an environmental catastrophe, like the possible rupture of the tailings dam because of an earthquake or heavy rains, lie wholly on the side of Greek taxpayers and the local communities, whose main income depends on agriculture and tourism, and therefore on an uncontaminated environment.

The costs for protecting the Canadian firm with police and private security are paid by the Greek government in order to prove its credibility to the Troika (the EU, the European Central Bank, and the IMF).

Local residents have been criminalized for opposing the mine, and entire communities have become polarized over the issue.

Between the 18th and 20th of December, Radio Schizoanalytique invites you to join us in Berlin for a three day long radio event with activists from Northern Greece and Berlin-based and international media artists and activists.