First, a quick update on what Robida has been up to these days: This weekend, almost all of the editorial board members of Robida magazine (we missed you, Janja!) got together on Lido di Venezia, where we were hosted by Elena who is there hosted by Daniela Levera. We spent our days taking walks, eating good food – the sweet sweet fritole veneziane – and of course, working on the 8th number of our magazine dedicated to the island.
It is a rare opportunity that almost all of the members of the editorial board get together and can discuss the received contributions in person. Our conversations were flowing from one topic to another, touching upon the present and the future of our collective, and as present times demand of us, also upon future itself. I - Aljaž - disappeared from the working table from time to time, quickly checking my telephone for new information concerning Putin's horrendous war on Ukraine, keeping other Robidas updated. I'll get back to this later.
* As usual, we start with this word which – pronounced differently – has two beautiful meanings in Italian and English. In Italian it means “dear”, when addressing women.
In this fourth letter from Robida that you've just received, we wanted to say more about our relatively new internet radio - Radio Robida . It started from a deep need of keeping the relations with our friends active throughout the whole year, especially during winter. And what could be a better way than through the power of the spoken word and sound? We began to ask ourselves: How would it be possible to combine hyper-specificity, which Robida is so fond of, with the will of being relevant for those who are far away from us? Could a radio station be a form of care – toward a place and a community? The idea of narrowcasting rather than broadcasting seemed a perfect fit to do just that: Using the radio as a walkie-talkie or a casual telephone call to a friend, to whom you sometimes don't have much to say - you're just establishing intimate contact with her, showing that you care. Radio as a means of cultivating communities. We're trying to make the radio work seem as effortless as possible, making it seem as natural as cleaning your teeth after you wake up.
Quickly after the workshop Hearing the Margins, which was held in Topolò in mid-September 2021, led by our now-good-friend Jack Bardwell, we started narrowcasting every second Saturday. The umbrella topic of our shows is a topic that keeps coming back in our everyday thinkings and lives: the margin. Whether it be through media, literary, landscape studies, sound-drawing, music, friendly talks or casual morning readings of theoretical texts, the topic of the margin is in a way always present in our program and is certainly a leitmotif of Robida in general.
Radio Robida is starting to get more collaborators narrowcasting from outside of Topolò. Let us only emphasize the latest member joining our radio team: The fabulous and witty Ola Korbańska with her Saturday LOL show! (Give her latest episode a listen here.)
Radio Robida is also working on a project of Asociation Ivan Trinko from Cividale titled Radio Tihotapci (The Smuggling Radio), in which we are already collecting information and stories on the smuggling of goods and ideas over the Slovenian-Italian border during the Cold War.
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Now is time for three special announcements:
First, we wanted to officially invite, all of those who are interested, to in some way contribute to Radio Robida. If you are in any way interested in radio stuff and the umbrella topic of the margin in the widest possible sense of the word, send us a message to radio@robidacollective.com and tell us about your ideas. It could be a music program, maybe just you talking about everyday stuff or perhaps astrophysics or any other thing imaginable!
The second and third announcements are a bit more specific:
On the 5th of March, we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the great Italian film director, writer, and poet. We would like to pay homage to Pasolini by collecting recordings of his poetry in any language you please , especially Italian, Friulian (as he started his work as a poet in friulano), Slovene (as not many people know, that Pasolini for a short time lived in Idrija, which is a small town in Slovenia, at that time part of Italy), and English of course.
As we have a narrowcasting session on the 5th of March (what a coincidence!), we will spend these few days collecting these recordings. If you want to send us your recording (it can also be done simply with a telephone), please send it to radio@robidacollective.com
(Teorema by Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968)
For the third announcement, I have to make a bit of a digression. In an interview for Slovene television two days ago, the current Slovenian prime minister Janez Janša said: “Europe is different today, also in terms of its view of energy, real conditions, and various utopian ideas that have flooded us in recent decades. We woke up in the real world.” War does not awaken us to the real world, but rather prolongs the phase of our napping. I need to express my concern at the current state of the world in these few days and at a special condensation of time which is so typical for times of crises, time of which Lenin spoke of when he said that there are decades where nothing happens; and that there are weeks where decades happen. I fear that decades of struggles on different fronts may be forgotten in a matter of days. Therefore, we want to present to you an open call for Radio Robida on the topic of women's struggle. As we are getting close to the 8th of March, we would like to do a small montage of fragments of different texts on the struggle for women's rights, feminism, and everything connected. If you want to contribute something, pick a fragment from a work of a woman you admire (it could also be up to a page!), record it, and send it to us at radio@robidacollective.com. We'll do a montage of all of the texts and play it on one of our narrowcasting sessions on the 2nd of April. The deadline for sending your contributions is the 26th of March.
And last but not least: For anyone interested in our past programs, you can listen to all of our shows on our Mixcloud account !
Ciao ciao, good night!
Thank you for reading us and supporting us always!
Aljaž Škrlep w/ Robida Fam
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Check the news related to Robida on our IG page (updated often) of FB (updated less often)!
If you want, you can dive in our archives going on our Mixcloud (where you can find Radio Robida's archive) or on these two old but updated tumblr: r-o-b-i-d-a and ancheirovisonogiardini.
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Hugs hugs hugs
Robida Fam
robidacollective.com