Radio Commons

Radio Commons is a platform for sonic interventions that seeks to practice solidarity by building collective agency. The website can be accessed here. Co-authored by a remote collective of artists and cultural workers, the project is an experiment in commoning at a distance. It was conceived during the lockdowns of 2020 at the invitation of Relais Culture Europe (Paris), and re-imagined through a series of experiments in collectivism during the course of 2022.

Radio Commons emerged from this experimental period as a sonic archipelago. The islands that make up the archipelago are temporary assemblies of beings and ideas. The archipelago challenges insularity. We, the archipelagistas, lash our life rafts together for survival, seeking common shores, looking for the others. Many of the islands are ‘terra incognita’: not yet populated, awaiting curiosity, inviting collaboration. We welcome all languages. It is through languages that we sense the archipelago’s sea/landscapes, and all that is in between, diving into the nuances of their sounds and rhythms.

The Sonic Archipelago is a nomadic proposal, an agent and participant in processes of assemblage and dispersal. It is a catalyst, an activator, a seed pod drifting slowly on the ocean or moving swiftly between land masses in the stomach of an animal. It is a way to organise material, build kinship and align with others in the work of the commons.

In the archipelago, relationships are fluid and mycelial, we seek the threads that connect us. The work unfurls at the speed of trust. We ask: how are the ways that we can act together changing? How can we grow stronger and more vulnerable together, through the rationale of the archipelago? How can we flow together, responding to the shifting tides of collapsing systems? These questions are bound together by a conviction that commoning is the third way, a fugitive co-enquiry.

The Sonic Archipelago is inspired by Edouard Glissant’s poetics of relationship, and his invitation to creolisation and Tout-Monde.

« Toute pensée archipélique est pensée du tremblement, de la non-présomption, mais aussi de l’ouverture et du partage » /
« All archipelagic thought is thought of trembling, of non-presumption, but also of opening and sharing ».

« Ma proposition est qu’aujourd’hui le monde entier s’archipélise et se créolise » / « My proposal is that today the whole world is becoming an archipelago and becoming creolised».

– Édouard Glissant, Le Traité du Tout-Monde

The members of the collective are Marta Bellingreri, Alban Cajarville, Giulia Crisci, Lina Issa and Ian Nesbitt.