The town of Palazzolo Acreide is situated 43 kilometres (27 mi) from the city of Syracuse in the Hyblean Mountains. Its cemetery is a city of stone for itself and probably hosts more inhabitants than the town has living ones.
A city of the dead…with rows of fresh flowers
“Il Giorno dei Morti” had been the day before yesterday, and we found the cemetery dotted with flowers. The air was saturated from the scent of lilies, with the herbal aroma of the chrysanthemums wavering in between. The after noon sun shone on granite and sandstone, there were impressive family vaults in the shape of small cathedrals, and graves so massively lidded with marble slabs that even on the day of resurrection the dead underneath would not be able to lift them …
The dead here do not rest in earth, or do they? By what means are these massive stones lifted then? Many gravestones were adorned with finely chiseled rose garlands, quite in the style of softly rounded rococo roses (in contrast to rose reliefs on German cemeteries that usually show a tea-hybrid style rose). Maybe this was a specialty of the local stonemason at that time.
Stone roses… and sunglasses (after dark)
All gravestones carried oval enamel or porcelain plates with a portrait of the deceased, the majority of them in black and white. Stern faces, many of them young. Some men were portrayed with their sunglasses on. Among the women there were many beauties that had died in their early 20s or 30s. No one was smiling (except for a lady on a 1980s colour photograph). Time and sunlight and rain had worked on the surface chemistry of the portraits: Silvery lines and spots obscured parts of the face, or partly changed their expression. It made them reminiscent of photographs of ghost séances –with the ectoplasma appearing as a silvery or white substance in the picture. But even without blemishes many faces spoke clearly of the hardships of Sicilian life: black eyes staring relentlessly back at the visitors, hairdos worn like invincible castles, and an unspoken sadness in the lines of the mouth of all of them.
Von Zeit zu ZeitAmazing artwork
There were rose bushes too, growing by the side of the gravestones. By the size of their branches they must have been old. 50 years, 70 years and plus. I kept wondering why or who would plant a rose in between either two graves or just at the border of a stone. “These roses”, said Patti, “maybe just fell out off the bouquets or wreaths and took root.” “These are grafted roses”, I said, “I don’t believe so”.
Rosehips enjoying the sunlight
… despite the confinement
We passed dozens of bushes, each almost directly growing from under a grave. In my imagination all those roses had been there first. Maybe this place had been a former rose garden. Or, when the cemetery was founded, the graves were smaller and earth only with a small stone. Any rose bush planted at that time could continue to grow after having graciously endured the great marble immortality of the late 1940’s.
A different arrangement with melocactusDead and alive at the same time: an opuntiaRead More
Trees, moon, fire. What else can you wish for when dealing with a 14 hour broadcast on Nightwalks, Rituals and Ceremonies”?
The files to listen to, of course – in case you missed it or had to go to bed. Datscha Radio’s first 6 parts are on mixclould with the rest of them to follow until AllSaintsDay.
14 hours of nocturnal radio ceremonies from 5:57 pm on, temperatures between 13 and 8 degrees with a waning moon, and our artist list is just great!
It is also fitting that October the 21st is also the “Worldwide Day of Feminist Radio”. Datscha Radio’s online stream will be shared from about 11 pm by two radio stations, Freirad Innsbruck and Freies Radio Neumünster, until sunrise. From midnight on, we can also be heard in England on Sound Art Radio. From 2 o’clock in the morning you can listen to us on 88.4 and 90.7 in Berlin and Potsdam.
Again, our program is free floating and will follow the comings and goings of the guests, and drift along with the smoke from the fire bon and the night winds. The Datscha radio team Gabi Schaffner, Kate Donovan, Niki Matita and Helen Thein is looking forward to greet the performing artists from nightfall on. In alphabetical order these are:
Ansgar Wilken – “The Secret Rhythms of Tulpen and Narzissen”
Christina Kyriazidi “Trauerrituale der Elefanten”. Mit Niki Matita
Ela Spalding – “Sundown”
Jodi Rose – Free Style Conversation Rituals
Kat Austen – Molecular Midnight
Marold Langer-Philippsen – “Maschkara”
Monaí de Paula Antunes and Kate Donovan – Ein Gespräch über: ring – a performative information and embodiment system for time travel and other multidimensional perceptual experiences
Niina Lehtonen-Braun – Iltakahvit mit Niina Nokkonen
Niko de Paula Lefort – “Aurality”
Peggy Sylopp – “Soundwalk Datscha”
Sisukas Poronainen – “Singing Fires. The Pauanne Archives 2006”
“Breaking Nuts” and Specials
This autumn, the hazelnut trees of the Datscha garden gave us an unusual harvest: in their shells they each host a secret story (or its continuations) that will be “hand-picked” by the radio makers. We will also broadcast a number of specials, such as Martyna Posnanska’s “Requiem for a Fly”, a lecture about killing methods involving “The Blue Flower of Death“, a reading on mushroom ceremonies as well es a short radio play by Hermann Bohlen.
Open Call
Many thanks to all the artists who submitted their works to dach Radios Open Call! Please understand that we can not give an exact date of their broadcastAna Berkenhoff, Boris Chassagne/60 Secondes Radio (Ausschnitte), Chelidon Frame, Joan Schuman, Julia Drouhin (Ausschnitte), Koho Jaripekka, Leon Twardy, Maria Blue.
We’ll broadcast directly from the Datscha-Garten from sunset to sunrise on October 21, 5:57 pm to 7:45 am on October 22, 2019. online on datscharadio.de on aporee.org: http://radio.aporee.org:8000/datscha via your own player: http://radio.aporee.org:8000/datscha.m3u There might be takeovers by other radio stations. As soon as we know we’ll tell you.
(Translation in due time, sorry) Unebener Boden, eingeschränkte Sicht, im wahrsten Sinn des Wortes unvorhergesehene Hindernisse: Das Spazierengehen bei Dunkelheit verlangt unseren Sinnen und unserem Körper andere Fähigkeiten und Sensibilität ab als das Flanieren bei Tage. Dies zu erforschen ist Teil von Datscha Radios vorläufig letzter Radionacht in 2019. Ein weiterer Schwerpunkt wird auf die Nacht als Ort nocturner Zeremonien gelegt. Eine Vielzahl von Ritualen und Zeremonien werden weltumspannend in den Zeitraum der Nacht gelegt… doch weshalb? Unzweifelhaft liegt es an der Nachbarschaft von Schlaf und Traum, die die Menschen seit jeher mit Ehrfurcht und Respekt erfüllt hat. Auch in der modernen Alltagswelt sind die Übergänge von Wachen zu Schlafen und umgekehrt geprägt von kleinen, aber für das Individuum wichtigen Ritualen.
Das Team fragt sich derweil, ob
die Decken reichen werden. So unvorhersehbar wie die Temperaturen in
dieser Nacht vom 21. auf den 22. Oktober ist auch unser Programm zum
jetzigen Zeitpunkt. Einige der KünstlerInnen sind jedoch bereits
bekannt, darunter:
Ela Spalding, Peggy Sylopp (Hear how you like to hear):Soundwalk Datscha, Niina Lehtonen, Marold Langer-Phillipsen, Zelda Panda/ Roberta Panda Perzolla und Christina Kyriazidi (Story in Berlin/ Food for Story) Die (Trauer)rituale der Elefanten – ein Gespräch mit Niki Matita.
Uneven ground, restricted vision, and quite literally ‘unforeseen’ obstacles: Walking in the dark activates different sensing abilities. Bodily boundaries shift and expand, and with them, thinking and imagination find new ways. The night is also a ceremonial space. A multitude of rituals and ceremonies are performed all over the world during the night… but why? It is undoubtedly due to the neighbourhood of sleep, death and dream, which has always filled people with reverence and respect. Also in the modern everyday world, the transition from being awake to asleep, and vice versa, are marked by unobtrusive – yet important to the individual – rituals.
With “Night Gardening III” Datscha Radio wants to explore the
ambience of night walks and rituals.
From sunset to sunrise, 5:57 pm on the 21st of October, until 7:45 am on the
22nd of October, 2019, we will be broadcasting straight from an
allotment garden in Berlin.
What are these rituals and walks, introducing us to
the absence of the sun? Datscha Radio wants to find out – and calls for your
radiophonic input. Send us your darkest, funniest, weirdest
private/stolen/hitherto unheard compositions and acoustic celebrations of the
night!
Please provide two or three lines each about the piece
and yourself including a website, if possible.
Please put “Night Walks, Rituals & Ceremonies” as
a subject line.
Deadline
Please submit your audio piece by the 15th of October,
2019.
Schedule
Our Datscha Radio program will grow with the flow of
the events that night. There will be no fixed time schedule. You’ll find a list
of all participating artists on our website in due time.
● in collaboration with
other radio stations and projects (if interested, please let us know)
About
Datscha Radio’s 2019 series
“Night Gardening” explores the sensual and auditory spheres of the night. Our
first episode dealt with the nightingale, while our second dealt with the
transposition of smell into sound. We broadcast online via datscharadio.de and via micro FM in the garden(s).
On the evening of the award ceremony, Datscha Radio will release three radiophonic loops at Humboldthain Club, that can be captured on site with radio receivers. “Radio Seed Bombs” is an acoustic cross-pollination and self-fertilization in one, conceived by radio artists Kate Donovan, Niki Matita and Gabi Schaffner.
“In “Seed Dispersal”, Kate Donovan explores the sounds and stories of various seeds on their journeys through water, air, and bodies: a cosmos of dispersal, told in radio snippets and sent upon a breeze. With sounds and voices from Pablo Juanes; Molly, Hunter & Scout.
Niki Matita presents “Babosa”: Eine Erkundung der Welt jener ungeliebten Gartenbewohnerinnen, die in vielen Menschen Ekel und Unmut hervorrufen. Niki Matita untersucht, ob, und wenn ja wozu, Nacktschnecken nützlich sein können, welche kulturelle und spirituelle Bedeutung ihnen zukommt und welche Abhilfe es gegen sie gibt.
With “Gymnospermia”, Gabi Schaffner will broadcast an illustrious potpourri of Sicilian fruit descriptions, seed sounds, lawnmower microsymphonies, and tiny garden soundscapes in fourteen miniature compositions. With the voices of: Paolo Cavarro, Hans Kellet, Dirk Heiden, Kate Donovan and Margarita (courtesy Romila Casile)
This radio art intervention can be experienced via personal radios, and perhaps the visitors will stumble upon a radio seedling sprouting in the near. “Radio Seed Bombs” can also be heard from the 14th – 15th of September on www.datscharadio.de.
1st of September: On invitation of „Le Jardin de Recherche Musicales“, Paris, Datscha Radio had the honor (and pleasure) to contribute a 30 min radio show to the line-up. Hosted by the artists Dinah Bird, Jean-Phillipe Renoult and Dr. No, and streamed via p-node.org an afternoon of radiophonic activities unfolded at Les Jardins du Ruisseau close to Porte de Clignancourt.
What is the sound of a plum dropping? In preparation of the „plum tale broadcast“ the trees in the Datscha Garden were energetically shaken, and dozens and dozens of fruits dropped onto the lawn. After removing the pits they were taken to the stove, where a pot already waited. A kitchen is not exactly the place you’d expect to set-up the gear for a radio broadcast, but well… Ms Thein shared her mike with the bubbling pot, stirring the jam-to-be with greatest attention. Ms Schaffner kept arranging the hot water cooker, the sugar and the glasses. And between the two of us we shared an ancient Japanese folk tale about a gardener and his beloved spirited plum tree. It was also a story about the uneven balance between true love and care-taking and the greed for beauty, embodied through the figure of a too ambitious samurai…
All went well and seven glasses of 2019 plum jam were filled. Thank you, Dinah, Philippe and Dr. No!
Fragrant was the night… and permeated with the sounds and reverberations of the numerous radio guests that materialised in the garden in the South of Berlin. This garden offered many paths (carefully tended by their owners Tiger Stangl, Valie Djordevic and Jochen Liedtke), and just as many approaches were taken in Datscha Radio’s quest for a ‘translation’ of scent into sound. The weather was very fine that evening, with the heat of the day still lingering in some formerly sunny spots, and the dusk that arrived after the station’s set-up was accomplished, steeped the garden and its plants in iridescent shades of continually fading blues.
Daylight fades, radio starts
“…That’s what the peony said in three
puffs of perfume”: The show’s kick-off was one of the ten flower scent poems
written especially for this occasion and played intermittently through the
night, rather like a scented station id. Written by Gabi Schaffner, they were
spoken, sung, whispered and hissed ingeniously by the New Zealand poet Hans
Kellett.
Kate had brought her hydrophones, which Niki
Matita played whilst Kate read a brief overview of Datscha Radio’s theme for
the second ‘Nightgardening’ session:
Smell comes in waves, with a breeze, it rides on the air. Just like radio.
Smell is a fleeting sensation, it lives in time, it connects directly to our memories and emotions. Just like radio.
Smells, odours, fragrances, perfumes, they are all around us. Just like radio.
An introductory walk through the garden
followed. Tina-Marie Friedrich (allgirls Berlin international) and Helen Thein
explored our location (dragging a long, long mic cable behind), conversing
about selected plants, the perfumes of their leaves and flowers, our human
sensitivities and culturally imprinted scent perception.
Scent walk with Helen Thein and Tina-Marie Friedrich
All the while more guests arrived, among
them Monika Glaser, chairwoman of the gardener’s association and her husband
Jürgen. The radio artist Jasmina Al-Qaisi accompanied by artist Helena
Otto, and the ‘maverick violinist’ Katt Hernandez as a last minute guest and
previous Datscha Radio artist. Tina talked about her research into the finer
details and cultural differences of smell perception, which led on to the
introduction of some of Datscha Radio’s open call artists, among them a piece
about the scent of rain by Ian Stenhouse. One of Niki Matita’s thematic DJ
Mixes followed.
“How is your nose”?
Looking from the outside into the window of this Treptower Datscha, we could now see Caroline McMillan, together with programmer Isabelle Wei and dancer Lena Kilchitskaya, preparing the wearable tech dress that Caroline had designed for their olfactory and experimental dance performance “Aura:Maton”.
Meanwhile, the long table in front of the terrace was decorated under supervision of the Mobile Radio duo Knut Aufermann and Sarah Washington. Wine glasses, six especially selected bottles of Moselwine, and still more guests appeared, among them Winona Lin and friends as well as the radio researcher Golo Föllmer and Kai Knörr, president of the “Studienkreis Rundfunk und Geschichte”.
“Aura:Maton” proved to be quite an
otherworldly experience. Dressed in a white dress, adorned with a head band (a
surreptitious brain wave detector), and wearing a mysterious ‘harness-minilab’,
consisting of LED lights, wires and an assortment of vials on her belly, Lena
appeared. Her face serene, she danced among the guests, graciously, stepping
forward, resting, bending, stretching out her arms. From time to time a blue
light flashed from her belly-lab and waves of scent were set free.
In
her talk, Caroline explained that dancing has an impact on the dancer’s brain waves,
which, in this case, then get stored and transformed into electronic signals
which in turn activate the scent machine the next time she dances. In the
garden, Lena was dancing to and with the scents of a dance memory. Data and
scents. McMillan says that for her, the main common traits between them lie in
the fact that both leave behind trails…
Kate Donovan and Katt Hernandez
Just a little bit later, Kate Donovan and
Katt Hernandez joined forces to play with frequencies. Kate had brought a SOMA
Ether (a so-called ‘sniffer’, which turns electromagnetic frequencies into
sound), in order to listen to the inaudible frequencies generated by the
outdoor radio studio. And Katt had brought her violin – her trusty old friend
by the name of Maude. Together they made and played with frequencies in and of
the garden.
A long table, six bottles and many tastes
Trails and tastes of a different kind were
explored in Mobile Radio’s expedition into “the extremes of Moselwine”. Mobile
Radio’s wine tasting involved six interviews with winegrowers from the region,
each stemming from a question concerning smell during the process of
wine-making. In between the interviews, one wine after another was slowly
decanted into the glasses and everybody was invited to spontaneously describe
the scent and taste. Each wine attracted its own peculiar vocabulary, from
“like my grandmother” to “cheesy” to “stale” to “woody”, “pearly” or
“calvados-like”. The performance took its course, lasting for an hour and a
half, and as such allowing ample time for Jasmina Al-Qaisi and her performance
partner Helena Otto to build a fire in preparation for their upcoming show.
“To the Belly and Back” featured delightful
scenes, musical interludes, and dialogues about food and eating and
smells. It was grounded in a very serious question: Can I trust you and how do
I know if I can trust you? Jasmina and Helena explored the answer by feeding
each other with eyes closed, food and non-food from the grill and further
afield, wrapped in foil or paper or plastic or nothing. Their trustful exchange
culminated in offering each other old (but clean!) socks to smell, which they’d
secretly filled with fragrant contents from the garden.
Studio view from the window…
Time for more coffee, one or two scent
poems, for some guests to make their way home, for open call compositions, and
for “The Scent of Water”, a preproduction initiated by Helen Thein, based on a
(local) water degustation with the American scientist Christy Spackman. By now
we had reached 3 am in the morning.
“Olfactophobia” is the irrational fear of
smells that can go so far that some people can’t even bear to think of certain
smells without suffering actual panic attacks. Niki Matita presented a radio
piece of that same name, that probed deeply into this special psychic
condition.
Kate Donovan on the garden path
Armed with a walkie-talkie, Kate Donovan
then disappeared down the main path to the end of the garden. From under the
colourful garden lights she read an excerpt from the novel “The Fountains of
Neptune” by Rikki Ducornet, taking listeners into the mind of the protagonist,
who had also disappeared into a strange and dreamy world of garden, meditation,
and mastication… “I could not help but think that if time had a smell it would
be like this.”
Sarah Washington: Under influence
We still had a lot on our plate to present
to our listeners: Niki Matita’s interview with Nicolle Schatborn of Keuken van
het Ongewenst Dier in Amsterdam about the “Smell of Dead Bodies”, more open
call contributions, and a fantasy sound tale in French about a scented lichen
in Paris, read by Julia Drouhin. Sarah and Kate agreed to read the English
translation together before the French piece was played, and the way they
rendered the story had a deep impact on all the present listeners.
The sun is rising
By 5am the skies were slowly lightening up in fluffy greys. At a quarter past, the time for our morning garden walk had come. Gabi, Tina and Kate went down the garden path, slightly tipsy from lack of sleep but happy to lean towards the garden plants again, to inhale their morning scents and the fragrance of a fresh day, and to greet the first rays of the sun that came forth behind the neighbour’s apple trees. Thanks to Udo Noll who provided for our streaming on his server.
