Together we will play records, talk and listen to versions of the work we have done and will do. The session will be somewhere amongst a spiral retelling and its planetary reverberations, an echo without a cause, a thunder-strike and its soundwave riding the ionosphere, a protest refrain, a knock warning, a Palestinian radio jingle, a dub, a peri-acoustics, a cease and desist siren, a new year’s broadcast. Tune in, stop by.

Link to the first broadcast: https://soundcloud.com/user-854660269-405465536/radio-earth-hold-colonial-voice

Radio Earth Hold is organised by Rachel Dedman, Lorde Selys and Arjuna Neuman, commissioned as a collateral project of Qalandiya International, and supported by the Serpentine Galleries.

It traces echoes between the anti-occupation movement in Palestine and anti-racism movements in the North American context. It examines British Mandate radio as a colonial instrument in Palestine, and Israeli control of Palestinian telecommunications as part of the architecture of occupation. It connects these to the birth of Mni Wiconi during the Standing Rock protests, radical midwifery practices, and the acousmatics of sound in the womb.

Broadening beyond political struggle to the phenomenon of ‘natural radio’, Radio Earth Hold’s research addresses how electromagnetic radiation functions at a bigger-than-planetary scale. How might natural radio and acousmatic sound—reverb without a cause, or echo without a source—offer a model for reorganising relationships between the individuals and the world? What solidarity emerges from the recognition of our participation in the transmission of planetary sound?

Radio Earth Hold is commissioned as part of the collateral program of Qalandiya International IV, and supported by the Serpentine Galleries, London.

Louis Henderson is a filmmaker who is currently trying to find new ways of working with people to address and question our current global condition defined by racial capitalism and ever-present histories of the European colonial project. The working method is archaeological. Henderson has shown his work at places such as; Rotterdam International Film Festival, Doc Lisboa, CPH:DOX, New York Film Festival, The Contour Biennial, The Kiev Biennial, The Centre Pompidou, SAVVY Contemporary, The Gene Siskell Film Centre, Gasworks and Tate Britain. His work is in the public collection of the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, France and is distributed by Lux (UK) and Video Data Bank (USA).

Photos by Benjamin Busch