Category Archives: #48

Show 908: The House Of Kinshasa Part 1 by Po B. K. Lomami (CKUT)

Po B. K. Lomami – The House of Kinsaha

This is the outcome of a WhatsApp call between my parents in Belgium and me in Canada about the final chapter of their house in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They recalled how two Zairean Ph.D. students, who just met in Brussels, decided to buy a house in Kinshasa without seeing it. They bought a home to prepare for their return to Zaire/DR Congo together after their academic program. The return never happened. Now retired, they just sold the house 36 years later. The house my brothers and I never grew up in is gone.

Like any call with my parents, I learned about way more than what I asked for. It is a snippet of the experiences and trajectories of the Congolese diaspora of their generation in Belgium. It is also a glimpse of how I experienced it as their child who left that same Belgium as soon as they could. The House of Kinshasa is a five-part sound project about the diasporic realities of transmission, return, and housing for a family spread over DR Congo, Belgium, and Canada. In this first part, I intertwine my parents’ story with my perspective, field recordings, and bits of CKUT’s archive. With the participation of my mother and my father.

Audio sources from CKUT’s archive include (in order):

  • Café. CKUT, 24 Jun 2022
  • “Child presentation.” Homelessness Marathon 2005. CKUT, 11 Jan 2005
  • “Origins of the XX Files.” XX Files. CKUT, 25 May 2016
  • “Economic Empowerment.” Black Talk. CKUT, 31 Jan 1992
  • “Roundtable Discussion on Black Identity as Immigrants to Canada.” CKUT, n.d.
  • “Diana Sharpe Interviews Prof. Joel Harder and Analyzes the Lumber Situation in Congo.” Amandla. CKUT, 2007
  • “Roberta Bondar, Canadian astronaut, Discovery Space Shuttle.”, CKUT, n.d.
  • Black Talk. CKUT, 1991, cassette side B

Po B. K. Lomami (Pauline Batamu Kasiwa Lomami) is a self-taught undisciplinary artist, art administrator, and artistic and public programmer. They are a Congodescendant from Belgium currently based in Tiohtià:ke-Mooniyang-Montreal. Exploring Afrofuturist principles and methodologies, Lomami’s art practice revolves around the displacement of work, the becoming of their subjectivity, and the possible collective futures with black, crip, queer and Afrofeminist perspectives.
https://pobklomami.art

Show 907: Doubtful No. 14: Land by Charlie Hamish Jeffery (*Duuu, guest slot)

Doubtful #14: Land

Doubtful is a radio program that does not know what it is going, or how often it would like to appear. Doubtful in size and shape and content and behaviour.
Welcome to Doubtful.

A program proposed by Charlie Hamish Jeffery for *Duuu.

Show 906: Fish for Thought by Co-Tension from reboot.fm

Co-Tension – Fish for Thought
From reboot.fm for radia.fm

By Varja Hrvatin, Polina Burovskaya, M. Marque Pham & Gideon Morison

Co-Tension – Fish for Thought was realized as part of the Kammer Kampus Radio organized by Katja Kobolt and Diana McCarty and produced by Noemie Cayron as part of the „Friendly Confrontations“ program curated by Julia Grosse und Julian Warner at the Münchner Kammerspiele in 2020.

 

Show 905: ERRANT WAVES IN ARCADIA by GABI SCHAFFNER for radio x

 

ERRANT WAVES IN ARCADIA
by GABI SCHAFFNER

Frequencies permeate our life-world on all levels.

They can be abstract, unfathomable, they can lurk at the threshold of our hearing, they can be extremely figurative or even plainly obtrusive. They can be soothing, piercing, alarming, beautiful, awe inspiring, familiar. Once in a blue moon they come along single, as one clear tone, more often they huddle in clusters or patterns. Frequencies sail like clouds along the horizons of our perception. They rain on us. And they sneak into the deepest layers of our brain, where they conjure up memories or feelings or both.

As a series of life-world-frequency vignettes, “Errant Waves in Arcardia” assembles varied notions of mimicry, dirt, duration and osmosis.

Recordings and composition: Gabi Schaffner, 2022
Accordion: Olsen Wolf, 2020
Musical Saw: Mimosa Pale, 2012/2020
Cat: Augustin, 2021
Drums: Toni Brokoli, Patrick Guderitz, 2020
String instrument: Anonymous Lady in Folk Music Shop, Taiwan 2019
Xylophone: Stella Braun, 2011
Husky dogs: recorded by Nathalie Grenzhaeuser, 2021

GABI SCHAFFNER
Gabi Schaffner works as an interdisciplinary sound artist and curator.
Her artistic practice is determined by the methods of poetic ethnography in connection with fluxus-like mise-en-scène, radio-making and sound art performances. Much of her work originates from journeys. Next to her radiophonic productions, Schaffner creates speculative musical genres and inserts them into music history in order to raise awareness for cultural, gender-related and/or geographical conditions.
Schaffner has been realising award-winning productions with Deutschlandfunk Kultur, radia.fm, Hessian Cultural Radio and ABC Australia. Since 2012 she maintains DATSCHA RADIO, a nomadic transmission project that links the medium of radio to current ecological issues.

Find out more about DATSCHA RADIO at www.datscharadio.de
and about GABI SCHAFFNERs projects in a broader perspective at www.schaffnerin.net

credits:
great many thanks to GABI SCHAFFNER for ERRANT WAVES IN ARCADIA … and we also say thank you to her artistic collaborators, contributors and donators – especially to Augustin the cat and to the Huskies, as well as to all the birds in the background!
last but not a special thank you to Karl Schönswetter =;)

metadata:
ERRANT WAVES IN ARCADIA by GABI SCHAFFNER
radia production: miss.gunst [GUNST + radiator x]
production date: july 2022
station: radio x, frankfurt am main (germany)
length: 28 min.
licence: (cc-by-nc-nd) GABI SCHAFFNER
www.radiox.de – www.gunst.info – www.datscharadio.de – www.schaffnerin.net

additional info:
includes radia jingles (in/out), station and program info/intro (english)

links:
radio x & radiator x: www.radiox.de – www.radiox.de/radiator-x
GUNSTradio & radiator x: www.gunst.infowww.gunst.info/radiator
Gabi Schaffner: www.datscharadio.dewww.schaffnerin.net

pic:
(c) Gabi Schaffner 2022

Show 904: tracing the source of the signal only opens the noise of the field (talking to the lyrebird about copyright), by radio cegeste


“I cannot gather formal consent from a bird or rock, believe me, I have tried. It remains all too easy for the act of field recording to be deemed inconsequential, for nature and the environment to be treated as a limitless resource. Yet if we are to continue to record and represent lifeworlds beyond ourselves and the environments in which so much change is occurring, we must also consider how such complex entanglements can be unpicked. What concepts and practices are required to examine the animal voice in terms of rights? What happens when we apply a culture of finitude to the soundscape itself?”
– Mark Peter Wright, Listening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, Critical Practice.

“A trace is the apparition of a distance, however close that which it evokes may be. Whereas the aura is the apparition of a nearness, however far away that which left it behind may be.”
– Walter Benjamin, fragment from The Arcades Project

tracing the source of the signal only opens the noise of the field (talking to the lyrebird about copyright) is a site-specific critical field recording research project conducted as fieldwork by radio cegeste in the location of Sherbrooke Forest, the Dandenong Ranges National Park, in Wurundjeri Country, about an hour out of the city of Naarm/Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. 

The project traces critical histories of field recording and their relationship to broadcast via a particular vein of pioneering Australian broadcast and field recording experiments beginning in June 1931, and conducted throughout the 1930s. In this period, the nascent development of Modernist audio transmission and storage technologies became momentarily fascinated with the recording abilities of a particular ancient, local bird species, the Superb Lyrebird Menura novaehollandiae.

In their paper, “First Sound Recordings of the Lyrebird,” Peter J. Fullagar and Ederic S. Slater compile a useful evaluative overview of this history. They describe the first recording (on the optical soundtrack of film) and the first (non-live) transmission: “The first sound recording in Australia of a wild bird was made 28 June 1931. On that day the song of the Superb Lyrebird Menura novaehollandiae was preserved on sound-film in Sherbrooke Forest in the Dandenong Ranges, east of Melbourne. Australian Sound Films Ltd. made this historic recording with the assistance of Ray Littlejohns who was at the time completing a film on lyrebirds. The recording was broadcast during the evening of 2 July 1931, from a radio station in Sydney. Until this time all attempts at recording the song of the Superb Lyrebird in the wild had been frustrated by lack of suitable equipment with all previous efforts being of unacceptable quality.”

These field experiments went on, and a subsequent session produced the first Australian commercially available sound objects documenting the vocal abilities of a wild bird: “The recording used in the production of a gramophone record was made on 29 May 1932; repeating the field recording methods used in 1931. This record was issued in late 1932 or possibly not until 1933. Further recordings on sound-film were made in Sherbrooke Forest; one of special interest being a 45 minute recording made in 1934 which was subsequently used in preparing the soundtrack for the film on lyrebirds produced on behalf of the Commonwealth Government by Ray Littlejohns.”

But the 1931 experiments also included live transmissions from the field: “The first direct broadcast of the song of the Superb Lyrebird went to air on Sunday morning 5 July 1931, following some earlier test transmissions in Melbourne. This broadcast, by the Australian Broadcasting Company, was made from Sherbrooke Forest with various telephone and land-line connexions making it possible to relay the signal for simultaneous transmissions out of Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide radio stations.”

The July 5th transmission also reached further, across Bass Strait to Tasmania: “Reception was hailed as excellent; indeed, reception of this transmitted signal in Tasmania allowed for re-transmission from a radio station in Hobart.” It was also heard live across the dateline: “A short wave overseas transmission of the broadcast on 5 July 1931 was provided by Amalgamated Wireless (A’asia) Ltd. and reception was confirmed, at least, from North America. Broadcasts of Superb Lyrebird song from Sherbrooke Forest were transmitted in 1933 and 1934, including further short-wave overseas transmissions.”

+++

In June 2016, during the depths of winter (which is Lyrebird breeding season), I traveled to the Sherbrooke forest on an initial field trip to conduct the first of a series of sonic re-mediations understood as “failed nature documentaries” that critically intervened into the above histories, undergirded by an exercise in investigative biomedia archaeology, researching and recording the site of the 1931 and 1932 recordings and broadcasts of the first wild bird to be captured by sound recording in Australian media history.

I took with me on this trip an ‘original copy’ (contradiction intended) of the 1932 gramophone record (from my own collection), which was one tangible object that emerged from these initial early twentieth-century collisions of site, species, mediated listening, and technological invention, as well as a gramophone player on which to play back this record to the (presumed – Lyrebirds are extremely territorial, and don’t roam far, a fact reflected in the culturally-transmitted content of their sonic repertoire over generations) descendants of the single Lyrebird captured on it. In this exercise I was assisted by members of the Sherbrooke Lyrebird Survey Group in (approximately) identifying sites, and while in the area I also joined their dawn survey session the next day, and recorded the sounds of these dedicated citizen scientists in their work, as well as the dawn chorus of Lyrebirds in the forest.

The 1932 record, recorded on the 29 May and released later that year or early the year after, is credited to “Herschells Pty Ltd. Sound Picture Producers Melbourne, recorded in the Sherbrooke Forest, Victoria, Australia under the supervision of Mr. Ray Littlejohns, member of Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union. Dialogue by Mr. Alfred L. Samuel.”

From the first pressing of the record’s original wrapper (beautifully illustrated with a drawing of a lyrebird), we can read a description of the bird it presents to home listeners, far from the Dandenong forests: “His mimicry is almost uncanny and in addition to his wonderful repertoire you will hear above the roar of the wind in the forest, perfect imitations of – the Butcher Bird, the Kookaburra, the Australian Thrush, the Whip Bird, the chuckle of a flock of Crimson Parrots, the Pilot bird, the Black Cockatoo, the Honeyeater… You will also distinguish what appears to sound like a man hammering a fence, a water pump in action, a Dog barking the warning cry of a White Cockatoo, the chuckle of a domestic Fowl and a man whistling for his Dog.”

Side A of this recording is a voiceover narrative, which functions to construct a setting of romantic wilderness, a framework into which a recording of a single lyrebird is placed, a “wild Australia” in contrast to the home listener’s position in their domestic sitting room: “Don’t forget that what you are about to hear”, the male voiceover says, is “a bird singing its own wild song,” with “the nearest human being almost a quarter of a mile away.”

Side B of this recording comprises a demonstrative cataloguing of examples of the lyrebird’s mimicry. The record’s narrator, in introducing each of these in systematic fashion, describes the lyrebird as “Australia’s greatest mocking bird”

The record is copyrighted as follows: “Melbourne: Herschells Pty Ltd, 1932. Recorded in the Sherbrooke Forest, Victoria, Australia, under the supervision of Mr. Ray Littlejohns. Must not be sold below price fixed by Copyright Owners. Must not be used for Radio Broadcasting or Publicly performed.”

No-one apparently asked the Lyrebirds whether they had given copyright clearance for their sounds. I thought it would be interesting, in the service of a critical field recording practice attuned to the ethical implications of sonic collection and in deference to the Lyrebirds themselves as superior sound recordists, to take it back to the forest to see what they had to say about this.


In the re-recording I made on this initial field trip, the 78rpm record was taken back to the place where it was recorded (as closely identified as I could manage, with the help of several books and the local knowledge of citizen-scientist and Dandenong Ranges resident, Jan Incoll) and played to this site over 70 years later, to produce a new series of residues of its playing to living Lyrebirds (a demonstrative playback conducted without human listeners apart from myself), who are presumed to be direct descendants of the historically recorded bird.

Listening back to the recording I made that day, the calls of various distant and close Lyrebirds in the present time of the 2016 recording echo that of the 1932 bird, their long-dead ancestor on the shellac record “singing its own wild song,” but they also overspill the record’s narrative framing and the limited capture and playback technology of the early twentieth-century. They emerge with startling clarity, to answer, to speak back, to include their own mimic-voices in the re-recording, and to perhaps reinvent the one-way exploitative tendencies of field recording practice itself, looping back time, listening and ancestry. Maybe, given their own incredible skills as “nature’s tape recorders,” they might even choose to one day include the recorded voice of their ancestor, filtered through human listening and the artifactual and temporal constraints of recording media, in their own future transmission (broadcast/reception) space.

Re-listening to this mise-en-scene within this half-hour composition, the Lyrebirds can be heard (as in a series of folk “rounds”), to “mock” the plummy British-inflected radio voice of the 78rpm record’s narrator as he praises them for their mocking-bird abilities, and to exceed his efforts to systematically set out each incidence of mimicry as an audio catalogue, frozen in time, in turn spilling over the three-minute time limit of a 78rpm record, to sing for the duration of the half-hour radia piece. The collision of the two timeframes – 1932 and 2016 – destabilises both the constructed soundscape and the integrity of the record, and the integrity of the location/field recording on-site. All the sounds for this experimental documentary were recorded on-site. Other sounds include wind in the trees, human voices (of passing tourists), rain and other species of birds, and myself, whispering a repetition of the voice-over narrative of the record within the forest site in earshot of living Lyrebirds, half lo-fi David Attenborough, half Australian Gothic, wrangling field recording and gramophone equipment by myself in the torrential rain, covered in leeches, almost a century later. This is layered with some audio of the volunteers from the Sherbrooke Lyrebird Survey Group finishing their annual dawn count. The Lyrebirds, however – their ancient culture positioned at the very beginning of the emergence of passerines – have the last (untranslatable) word.

++++

Many thanks to Jan Incoll (a.k.a “The Lyrebird Lady”) and all involved with the Sherbrooke Lyrebird Survey Group for the dawn cups of billy tea, the companionship, and the tolerance of microphones.
This project was partially developed while an artistic fellow at the State Library Victoria 2018-19.
It was conducted on the lands of the Wurundjeri people (Woi-wurrung language group), who are the Traditional Custodians of Melbourne and surrounding lands. In creating this work I pay my respects to all indigenous elders, past present and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.

Show 903: I hAve No voIcE by Juliedesk (∏node)

I have no voice is a spoken word piece construite sur une indétermination de sons en chaos, phonétiquement structurés de façon à ce qu’ils forment leur propre langue parlée. La voix en outil langue, charcute cut le langage et sa parole par tranche, slices de syllabes, et hypercut.
De ritournelles en ritournelles la voix avance en deux langues et devient une langue à langage informatique, au parler algorythmique. Le rythme et la déconstruction des mots, voix hâchée et mots collés pour expérimenter la parole en la réinventant.
La voix dit qu’elle n’a pas de voix, elle est une IA, un bot, sa voix se prénomme Daniela, le féminin de Daniel dans 2001 Odyssée de l’espace de Arthur C. Clarke et Kubrick, et l’un des avatars dont Annlee parle dans Anywhere Out of the World (2000 Parreno).
Une langue frgl (franglais) ou glfr(glaisfran) ou françaisanglais ou
Frengl (frenchenglish) ou englfr (englishfrench) ou frenchenglish.
La confusion du sens dans tous les sens à mon sens un sens essentiel.

I have no voice is a spoken word piece based around an indeterminacy of sounds in chaos, phonetically structured so that they form their own spoken language. Here the voice is used a tool, it cuts into language and slices speech into syllables and hypercuts.
As the refrain develops the voice advances in two tongues and becomes a computer language, with an algorythmic diction. The rhythm and deconstruction of the cut-up fragmented voice and seeming hastily pasted together words are an experiment with speech through reinvention of the idiom.
The voice tells us she has no voice, she is AI, a bot. Her voice however has a name, Daniela, the feminine of Daniel in 2001 Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke and Kubrick, and one of the avatars Annlee speaks about in Anywhere Out of the World (2000 Parreno).
A language frgl (franglais) or glfr(glaisfran) or françaisanglais or
Frengl (frenchenglish) or englfr (englishfrench) or frenchenglish.
The confusion of meaning in all directions has, in my opinion, an essential meaning.

Instrumentaux: Joseph Marzolla
https://soundcloud.com/juliedesk
https://www.instagram.com/julie_coutureau_brossa_i_roger/
www.juliecoutureau.com

Show 902: Crown Quartet – A Natural Contract live at NaturArchy Resonance IV (Usmaradio)




Usmaradio presents
Crown Quartet
A Natural Contract
Sound Art in Four Countries
Resonances IV – NaturArchy: Towards a Natural Contract

LIVESTREAM : 23 June 2022, 17:00 – 18:00 CEST
➥ usmaradio.org and a radio network across Europe:
➥ Radio Raheem (Milano)
➥ Neu Radio (Bologna)
➥ Orange 94.0 (Vienna)
➥ Fango Radio (Firenze)
➥ Kanal 103 (Skopje)

Crown Quartet
Croatia: Zahra Mani – double bass, bass & electric guitars, field recordings, live electronics
Italy: Roberto Paci Dalò – clarinet, bass clarinet, voice, live electronics
Hungary: Tibor Szemző – voice, bass flute, flute
Austria: Mia Zabelka – electric violin, vocals, live electronics

Station Manager and sound engineer: Alessandro Renzi
Technical direction at JRC: Denis Novello and Andreas Aschberger

We are pleased to announce the new sound art project A Natural Contract by the Crown Quartet. The project is supported by the festival Resonances IV – NaturArchy: Towards a Natural Contract.

To know the world is to breathe, to breathe is to savour the world. An interspecies dialogue where you find yourself human, vegetable, animal and mineral, in the name of fusion. A world composed not of objects but of streams that penetrate us and that we penetrate, of waves of varying intensity and in perpetual movement. We can no longer perceive the world as a simple collection of objects or as a universal space containing all things, but as the site of a veritable metaphysical mixture. Towards a “multispecies storytelling” (Donna Haraway).

A Natural Contract is created for Resonances IV and it crosses borders through the simultaneity of music and language in a musical exchange between four different European countries. The four countries in the Alps-Adriatic-Region have been barely accessible due to the Corona pandemic. The idea of this live sound art concert at a distance is to invoke notions of memory, a discourse, a call to the most basic elements of humanity and society.

A Natural Contract is a new project for the Crown Quartet, conceived and directed by Usmaradio. In addition to the rich instrumentation of the quartet, A Natural Contract has a textual layer embedded in the compositional structure (which leaves room for spontaneous improvised exchange). As with field recordings in music, the linguistic elements are subjected to selection, processing, reproduction and abstraction of text fragments that acquire new significances in connection with the sounds and the music.The multilingualism of the text fragments reflects the diversity of the musical languages and approaches of the four musicians. Hungarian, Italian, various German accents, English and Croatian meet the abstract vocal sound art of Zabelka and Szemző.
Thus vocal modes of expression are explored and contrasted in their diversity. There is a musical transformation of semantics, reflecting the absurdity that arises when you repeat a word for a long time, highlighting the transitions between language and sound, from noise to music. These processes in turn reflect the shifting meanings of terms such as borders and freedom in theCorona-shaped cultural-political landscape.

All four ensemble members have been working in the field of radio art for many years and have participated in diverse live stream project formats. So far, due to the technical challenges and complexity, these projects have always been implemented in cooperation with public institutions.

The radio as an artistic stage or platform is a unique performance and communication space. It is always a special moment to play live on the radio and to come into intimate contact with listeners in their own four walls. In times of physical distancing, the radio in connection with the internet offers a new enhanced platform for communicative exchange.

A Natural Contract is about overcoming borders through music and language.
A Natural Contract overcomes boundaries that have closed at an astonishing speed due to Covid-19. The long-term social, economic, socio-political implications of the events of the last few months are not yet foreseeable – just as little as we know how the virus and its mutations will affect our futures. In this respect, A Natural Contract is also a memory, a discourse, a reflexion of the most fundamental elements of humanity and society.

The four artists have been connected via internet stream from their studios in Austria, Hungary, Italy and Croatia in an acoustic exchange consisting of music, language and sound. The piece revolves around questioning acoustic materials, their manipulation, meaning, application and aesthetics.

within Resonances IV – “NaturArchy: Towards a Natural Contract “
A Natural Contract is produced by Resonances IV in collaboration with Usmaradio and Giardini Pensili.

Official Website of Resonance IV Summer School

In 2020 Usmaradio created the series Crown – fighting the lockdown through radio. An international tea time live concerts radio series. 33 daily collaborative telematic performances with the remote participation of artists from all over the world.
CROWN PODCAST CHANNEL IS AVAILABLE HERE
Later on, this experience contributed to the creation of the Crown Quartet project.

Crown Quartet
Zahra Mani (UK, PK, resident in Austria) is a musician, composer and curator. She performs live in various constellations and creates multi-channel installations and radio art. Her work combines field recordings, instruments and voices in an ongoing exploration of sound and music, investigating and revealing the spaces between.
Roberto Paci Dalò is an Italian clarinetist, composer, visual and sound artist. He performs worldwide in the usual and most unusual places.
Tibor Szemző Composer, performer, media artist, lives in Hungary. Oriented by his diverse lines of interest towards the borderline areas of the various genres. His works are present across Europe and beyond.
➥ Austrian violinist, vocalist, improviser and composer Mia Zabelka is at the forefront of international electro-acoustic performance art. She developed a unique musical language she calls “automatic playing”, where the music grows out of her body and gestures and finds its expression in her acoustic/electric violin, electronic devices, alien objects and voice. The violin itself becomes a sound machine.

➥  FULL 46-MIN PERFORMANCE IS AVAILABLE HERE

Pictures by Alessandro Renzi


Usmaradio – Centro di Ricerca Interdipartimentale per la Radiofonia (CRIR) / Interdepartmental Research Centre for Radio Studies, is a workplace of The School of Radio to develop an innovative radio pedagogy. Workshops, work sessions, meetings, presentations of live performance as sections of the project. Produced by UNIRSM | Università degli Studi della Repubblica di San Marino. usmaradio.org / theschoolofradio.org / unirsm.sm


 

Show 901: Grotte Song by Claire Serres (Radio ARA)

“Grotte Song”, a vocal performance by French artist Claire Serres was presented in August 2021 as part of a series of countdown radio shows leading up to Radio Art Zone, a 100-day long celebration of radio art as part of the European Capital of Culture Esch2022 from June 18th – September 25th. It was broadcast from the contemporary art space “Konschthal” in Esch-sur-Alzette that opened to the public a few months after this behind the scenes live exploration.
For more information on “Radio Art Zone” and the live stream: www.radioart.zone
For more information on Claire Serre’s work: https://ligie.org/

Show 899: an SOS from Masafer Yatta (radioart106)

On 4 May 2022, the Israeli Supreme Court approved the forcible transfer of more than 2,200 Palestinian residents of Masafer Yatta (South Hebron Hills) after the military declared their area of residence as “Firing Zone 918.” In handing down this judgment, the court permitted the state to commit a war crime. 

This broadcast joins the emergency call to #SaveMasaferYatta. It is mainly compiled from local activists’ documentations of home demolitions, military assaults, Illegal Jewish settlers attacks, and new interviews.

I am Wazha Ayub Abu Sabha, 60 years old. We have been living on this land since I was born, and I got married and had a baby, and I had grandchildren and brides in law, all this land. And my husband, rest his soul,  got a cardiac arrest because he was here and did not agree to go home, then he got a cardiac arrest in the evening after he came home and we milked the goats, then he got a cardiac arrest and we called the car that came to pick us up, we returned home and he died. And we did not move from here. We built houses and wanted to rest and then they came and demolished our houses, 5 rooms, and a room on the second floor where my son wanted to entertain friends and another room that served as a warehouse, and a shed. On the first time they demolished everything. Then there were people who brought us houses and helped us, we rebuilt the houses. And we also set up a pigeon nest, a kitchen and other rooms. We were offered to move away from where we were the first time, that’s what we did but they demolished everything at once. They came the second time and destroyed everything at once the rooms and the kitchen and everything. On the third time [demolition], people helped us to set up tents. Two tents. Then suddenly in the middle of the day without any warning we saw tanks coming towards us. They moved the tents again and even the pipes – destroyed and removed from the place also a tree that was in the place. They uprooted it.

Then they destroyed everything. The legume warehouse, they took out the food for the sheep using a crane, and using a knife they opened all the food bags and covered them with earth. where shall we go? What shall we do? We sat here in the sun until they brought us the keys to the clinic where we are sitting now. The lambs and sheep were not saved either, they were also harassed. They took them out of their sheds, the lamb that gave birth, died in the morning, and our losses… we do not know how much …. And now we are in this heat, who can sit under this scorching sun?

This is our land and this is our homeland. Where shall we go? We have no other place, can’t leave and don’t want to leave.”

Recorded by Basel Al-Adaraa, Nasser Nawajah, Meira Asher and more. Speakers: Eid Hathaleen, Wazha Ayub Abu-Sabha. Interpreter and field coordinator: Hamdan Mohamad Hurani. Translation: Samia Nasser. Thanks to Sulaeman Salem Al-Adaraa, Kefah Al-Adaraa and the activists at Masafer Yatta, South Hebron Hills. Produced by Meira Asher for radioart106

Additional information: B’TSELEM #SaveMasaferYatta