A local public-address system operates at the 10th-Anniversary Stadium and in the surrounding market area, broadcasting all kinds of information, from buy-and-sell offers to administrative announcements, but only in Polish. The project Radio Stadion Broadcasts transformed the local PA system into a weekend radio station broadcasting programmes submitted by international radio artists or suggested by the the 10th-Anniversary Stadium vendors in their various languages, Russian, Vietnamese, Armenian, but not Polish. The project was inspired by a work by Danish artist Jens Haaning, who broadcast jokes in Turkish over a loudspeaker in Copenhagen’s central square. Naturally, they were understood only by members of the Turkish minority. The installation temporarily suspended the power of official language, bringing out the ‘invisible’ and for once turning the majority into a minority.

Deriving from the concepts of radio-arts, the project aimed at creating a micro-community of performers and listeners made up of people who have since 1989 been subtly enriching the homogeneous landscape of the post-Communist city. Once, listening to Radio Free Europe, we would hear the names of Western cities — Frankfurt, London, or Paris. Now that the border of the symbolic West has moved, it is Poland that has become the West for Hanoi. The voices heard on Radio Stadion were voices that are not usually heard in Warsaw, voices from the East: Izmir, Addis Ababa, Yerevan. The standard programming — news, commentary, weather reports, and the like — were prepared by Jacek Skolimowski and Adam Witkowski (a journalist and an artist involved in radio art, respectively) from Radio Simulator, as well as by Pit Schultz and Diana McCarty from Berlin’s Backyard Radio, who fight for free access to radio frequencies and encourage the creation of independent local radio stations.

Stallholders visited the presenters’ booth from which Radio Stadion was broadcasting and conducted their own live programmes: you could listen to Tibetan manifestoes and live coverage from various spots across the market. The Radio began operating on Sunday at 9 a. m., when business at the Stadium is brisk, and was then but one of the hues in a larger cacophony of sounds. As the day wore on, its sound became more and more distinct. In the afternoon, the broadcasting resounded among the market’s empty littered alleys like some alarming announcement.

In his essay on his own work, artist Krzysztof Wodiczko cites the Greek term parrhesia, meaning the ability to conduct public criticism, to include painful issues in the discourse, to call to the blackboard. A parrhesia artist, Wodiczko says, is one who uses tools and instruments ‘helpful in expression and communication and in facilitating communication between devices, actions, and situations’, and who himself constructs them. Wodiczko’s own devices, like the Personal Instrument, the Homeless Vehicle, or the Alien Staff used art and technology for the purpose of performative urban actions aimed at amplifying the public presence of certain social groups or strata. Radio Stadion had a similar intended function. It restored the critical and conflict-generating value of public space. Many Polish vendors were alarmed when, instead of second-rate Polish radio, the loudspeakers started broadcasting Arabic singing. They protested the ‘whining’ and ‘wailing’, that noise. The hitherto Polish sonic background turned out to have been a transparent norm, and the ‘Arabic wailing’ became unbearable.

The radio created a space of disagreement, highlighting social exclusions and the false compromise Chantal Mouffe writes of. Various ethnicities coexist in the everyday life of Jarmark Europa, but this silent agreement is a compromise paid for by the silence, frustration and oppression of some. The distributors of the products sold by the Vietnamese collaborate with the Vietnamese embassy and are loyal to the regime, so opposition-minded Vietnamese have the choice of either selling Russian or Thai goods or disappearing from the stadium. One of the functions of Radio Stadion was to inform the Asians of the situation, to make activist announcements in Vietnamese, to seize control of the internal instruments of power and communication. Finally, the Radio changed the face of the market itself, with accidental listeners comfortably stretched out in deck chairs, oblivious for a moment to the fever of cheap shopping.

http://www.radiosimulator.org/

http://backyardradio.de/blog/

Chosen articles and reviews:

Sybille Korte, Katze odel Nudelmaschine, "Berliner Zeitung" 23.11.2007

Julia Slater, Spreading the Swiss Word in Eastern Europe,Turkish Weekly, 11.03.2009

Daniel Miller, Stadium X, Frieze, 15.05.09