ARK Porto A School at the Edge of Nowhere
Chronicles of the Margins. Lesson #8
July
2021
Tue
13
ARK Porto A School at the Edge of Nowhere
Chronicles of the Margins*
Lesson #8
Rodrigo Paglieri, RÁDIO-MAPA COMUNA: O caçador de ondas
The mapping work Rodrigo Paglieri brought to the ARK PORTO School at the Edge of Nowhere bears a particular activist connotation: it refers to the claim to air and broadcast space for minorities through the nearly extinct community radios. After presenting some of his previous works that helped frame the advent of the Communal Radio-Map, Rodrigo challenged the students in the class for a walk through the city in search of traces of resistance.
An analogue radio and an antenna placed in his backpack mark the location of this ethereal navigation through electromagnetic waves: the movement of the body shall mirror the absence and presence of radio broadcast and possible interferences in the Hertzian space picked by Rodrigo, the so-called white frequency. This movement, streamed to Google Maps through a geolocation system, will register the path taken and this radical cartography. The white frequency we’re chasing corresponds to the absence of transmission and at the same time reveals the void that could be taken by discordant, alternative and community voices. Nowadays, the few community radios that still come up every now and then mostly broadcast on-line and no longer resort to their original space, which lies there void, evenly white and in silence.
The Radio Law in Portugal, as in other European countries and the rest of the world, made it impossible for community radios and small local radios to have the right to airtime over decades. Pirate radios from the early 1980s, a phenomenon that led to the emergence of hundreds of private radios occupying those spaces, died out because of that law, which enforced legalisation, regulation and subsequent termination of non-official radio stations. Rodrigo Paglieri’s research is based on the example of this kind of initiative and also on the use of radio in processes of political dispute and struggle (as that of the Chilean miners in the 1970s or the counterculture movements of the 1960s and 70s in the USA and in Europe). Born in Chile and having lived in Brazil from 1988 to 2018, he arrived in Portugal in 2019, after a 1600 km walk from Barcelona to Porto that gave rise to the Radionómada [Nomadradio] project, from which this Communal Radio-Map descends. There’s a poetics of absence and resistance about him as an errant beacon that receives sound signals and sends out a vibrant physical trail going against a fateful invisibility.
It may make sense for it to be the last class of the ARK PORTO School at the Edge of Nowhere and thus this its last chronicle: leaving us with a map that supports the idea that social voids are being created in a digital world that we can learn how to decode, denounce and take up. With the body and digital tools.
*Chronicles of the Margins - Gisela Leal, The Chronicler of the Margins, will follow the trans/cross-border expeditions of ARK Porto A School at the Edge of Nowhere, mapping the coordinates and identifying the territories explored by the “new cartographers” of the city in this open-air classroom. She summarised the covered contents on a daily basis.
Chronicles of the Margins*
Lesson #8
Rodrigo Paglieri, RÁDIO-MAPA COMUNA: O caçador de ondas
By Gisela Leal
The mapping work Rodrigo Paglieri brought to the ARK PORTO School at the Edge of Nowhere bears a particular activist connotation: it refers to the claim to air and broadcast space for minorities through the nearly extinct community radios. After presenting some of his previous works that helped frame the advent of the Communal Radio-Map, Rodrigo challenged the students in the class for a walk through the city in search of traces of resistance.
An analogue radio and an antenna placed in his backpack mark the location of this ethereal navigation through electromagnetic waves: the movement of the body shall mirror the absence and presence of radio broadcast and possible interferences in the Hertzian space picked by Rodrigo, the so-called white frequency. This movement, streamed to Google Maps through a geolocation system, will register the path taken and this radical cartography. The white frequency we’re chasing corresponds to the absence of transmission and at the same time reveals the void that could be taken by discordant, alternative and community voices. Nowadays, the few community radios that still come up every now and then mostly broadcast on-line and no longer resort to their original space, which lies there void, evenly white and in silence.
The Radio Law in Portugal, as in other European countries and the rest of the world, made it impossible for community radios and small local radios to have the right to airtime over decades. Pirate radios from the early 1980s, a phenomenon that led to the emergence of hundreds of private radios occupying those spaces, died out because of that law, which enforced legalisation, regulation and subsequent termination of non-official radio stations. Rodrigo Paglieri’s research is based on the example of this kind of initiative and also on the use of radio in processes of political dispute and struggle (as that of the Chilean miners in the 1970s or the counterculture movements of the 1960s and 70s in the USA and in Europe). Born in Chile and having lived in Brazil from 1988 to 2018, he arrived in Portugal in 2019, after a 1600 km walk from Barcelona to Porto that gave rise to the Radionómada [Nomadradio] project, from which this Communal Radio-Map descends. There’s a poetics of absence and resistance about him as an errant beacon that receives sound signals and sends out a vibrant physical trail going against a fateful invisibility.
It may make sense for it to be the last class of the ARK PORTO School at the Edge of Nowhere and thus this its last chronicle: leaving us with a map that supports the idea that social voids are being created in a digital world that we can learn how to decode, denounce and take up. With the body and digital tools.
*Chronicles of the Margins - Gisela Leal, The Chronicler of the Margins, will follow the trans/cross-border expeditions of ARK Porto A School at the Edge of Nowhere, mapping the coordinates and identifying the territories explored by the “new cartographers” of the city in this open-air classroom. She summarised the covered contents on a daily basis.
© Pedro Sardinha
© Pedro Sardinha
© Pedro Sardinha
