Every Time
A Ear di Soun:
SAVVY Funk

Within the framework of Every Time A Ear Di Soun–a documenta 14 Radio Program, and for the duration of twenty-two days the spaces of SAVVY Contemporary will be transformed into a radio-station, an open studio and a platform where audio material and sonic content will be produced live and broadcast (on FM, on short waves and online) and where the public is invited to engage in a collective practice of critical listening. A 24/7 radio-program as a work of art, SAVVY Funk is conceived as a space for aural experimentation, for new forms of participation, performativity, epistemological diversity, intellectual contagion and hangabout. Hosting a wide range of practices and languages, SAVVY Funk explores sonority and auditory phenomena as a medium to write counter-hegemonic histories, deliberates on how sound creates and accommodates psychic and physical spaces.

Drawing upon the power of sound and radio to shape forms of knowledge and action, inspired by Franz Fanon’s idea of the radio as a means of political struggle and resistance (Franz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 1959) and by Arnheim’s call to empathically bring poets “into the wireless studio” (Rudolf Arnheim, Radio: an art of sound, 1936), SAVVY Funk has invited eighteen artists to shape the radio programme. The artists invited have developed collaborations with students from the Class for Experimental Radio at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, led by Prof. Nathalie Singer and Martin Hirsch.

Furthermore, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar is also contributing an open archive with more than 200 items: from Singer’s private collection–comprising landmark books, records and historical exhibits since the early days of broadcasting and radio-drama–to the digital archive of radio art EXPA, where visitors can browse through and listen to 7.000 radio works spanning more than a century of radio art history. This archive dedicated to sound and art – accommodated within the structures of Mutant Matters by Lorenzo Sandoval and S.T.I.F.F – is in dialogue with SAVVY.doc, the open library of SAVVY Contemporary challenging archive’s traditional categorisations and power mechanisms beyond Western epistemology, and with Colonial Neighbours, SAVVY Contemporary’s permanent radical and participative archive on German colonial history.

Alongside the radio-program and the reading and listening room, it is a series of footnotes in the form of artworks, documents, video and audio-pieces which reflects on auditory agency and the poetic and political dimension of sound. Besides the contributions by SAVVY Funk artists, Rui Vilela is presenting research material focusing on the history of Guinea-Bissauan Rádio Libertação founded during the Portuguese colonial occupation in 1967 and playing a crucial role in the transmission of the ideas of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde (PAIGC) founded by Amílcar Cabral.

Spread across the spaces of SAVVY Contemporary, the footnotes are connected to the main body of the radio through a spatial intervention by artist Igor Eskinja. Visitors to SAVVY Funk are invited to delve into the multilayered research material, and to experience a radio in the making, while becoming actors in an “imaginative partnership between practitioners and audience” (Seán Street, The Poetry of Radio: The Colour of Sound, 2012).