Radio Teahouse
LOCATION:
BARCELONA, HULL, EL PRAT DE LLOBREGAT, AARHUS, AND OTHER PLACES
The radio creates a community space open to all.
It brings people together for conversation and music. Through participation, they ‘brainstorm’ inadvertently about ideas and projects for improving their neighbourhoods, villages, towns and cities.
After noting how online community radio can create a social space for people to get together, we decided to experiment with it as a tool.
The first sessions we did, in Poble-Sec (Barcelona) combined live online radio and the baking of biscuits. A neighbour sent down an ethernet cable through his balcony and we interviewed anyone who happened to stop by.
Its second incarnation was in Hull where a weekly radio show, Bite the Biscuit Boulevard Radio, formed the basis of what later became a weekly market, Bite the Biscuit Neighbourhood Market.
In the radio people request songs, they express opinions, they interview each other, they report from wherever they happen to find themselves in the moment (a party, a demonstration). The radio is adaptable.
COMPOST
Like well-aired soil, the radio is an permeable space with porous boundaries. It responds creatively to changing circumstances.
During the Covid-19 pandemic we streamed live from our living room with people sending us messages from different corners of the neighbourhood and of the globe.
Afterwards some of our collaborators started creating their own radio programs. These weekly programs dealt with different themes: mental health, feminism, rebel music, musical history.
As we write these words the radio forms part of Waffle, a weekly community cafe in the HU3 area of Hull. Waffle takes place at the Lonsdale Community Centre and is a collaboration between the Giroscope Cooking Project, W.A.N.T (We Are Not Takeaway) and Cooperation Hull.
GERMINATE
The space created by the radio is informal and welcoming. It tends to be located in well-transited places, social and accessible: a cafe in Montjuic (Barcelona), on the street in the Gothic neighbourhood (Barcelona), a social gathering in the house of a friend (Aarhus). The conversations are about day-to-day matters, things we all share and are easily understood by all. We invite people to participate and we like it when they interrupt us without asking permission. The musical score and the conversation are like streams of consciousness responding to each other, going on tangents, sprouting in different directions.
CARE
A tangle of audio cables, cookie crumbs on the table, an explicit rejection of being professional/experts, all this informality generates an atmosphere where people aren’t afraid to participate. Each person closing their fingers around a microphone is invited to make noise, ‘ahems’, uncomfortable silences, talking with their mouths full, sharing a song or an idea, occupying this radiophonic space freely. This is the basis and the meaning of being a community radio.
The changes made throughout the radio’s life, the creative responses to circumstance mentioned above are also responses to ongoing reflections, to us always keeping our fingers on the pulse of how our listeners, our collaborators and how we ourselves feel, slowly tweaking, making improvements to the radio, making it better fit its purpose as a space for ideas and initiatives to grow in conversation.
SUPPORTED BY
