Text for [re.03] by Xenia Benivolski - commissioned by Radio Elsewheres

Signs of Life

Two reasons I listen to the radio: the first is to be moved, and the second is to not be homesick. Lately, I wear my AirPods without playing anything, cocooned like an audio voyeur, listening to what’s around me while pretending to be distracted. There’s that space between inside and outside that’s not just perceptive but consciously constructed, where selected information filters through the walls of a neighbour apartment, a lovers’ fight carried by airwaves into the coiling spiral of the ear, where the brain unravels and reshapes them into new memories. When retold, they’re digested by synapses and emotion, one space becoming another, until imaginary scenarios stretch to infinity, containing all humans, animals, and noise-making beings.

There’s an anecdote that some of the first musical instruments might have been bells or jingles made from cowrie shells said to hold a pearl. When the animal inside died and turned to dust, the shell became a resonant object, alive again in a new way. Across history and cultures, noise-making things have been seen as sentient, or at least alive. The sky is sound’s primary carrier, through wind, thunder, and other unexpected messages from above. In post-apocalyptic films, people search radio channels for the familiar tenor of the human voice. Sometimes, waves of sound crash into the back seat of a crowded car, or a taxi in a foreign city where talk radio becomes your first encounter with its soundscape, seeping through tinny speakers in an airport bar, a street food stand, or the dusty corner of a convenience store.

Listening to the radio means being with it, and with yourself. There is something habitual about hearing disembodied voices; you can tune in or out without obligation. It’s provisional and casual, an opening of the ear to the world. You dip into a stream of consciousness and slip into another space and time. Tuning into Radio Elsewheres early this morning took me back to Canada, where people were still wrapping up the previous day.

The first editions of Radio Elsewheres grew out of Velibor Božović’s exhibition Unfolding Elsewheres, a project rooted in the lingering psychic and social displacements of the Bosnian War. Conceived as an inquiry into the afterlives of exile, Unfolding Elsewheres gathered fragments of conversations with members of the Bosnian diaspora -- people who left or were forced to leave in the 1990s and continue to live in the suspended temporality of migration. The work traced how memory moves through speech and silence, and through the fragile infrastructures that connect one home to another. From these exchanges, Velibor came to understand radio not only as a broadcast medium but as a vessel for dispersed voices, a way of remapping belonging through sound.

While the show reflected on the displacement of Bosnians thirty years earlier, Bosnia (and especially the city of Bihać, which hosted Velibor’s exhibition) had, by 2023, become a transit corridor for migrants from North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Thousands were stranded in precarious camps on the country’s western border, halted by European xenophobia. This repetition of history transformed Unfolding Elsewheres from a memorial into an ethical problem. It is impossible to speak of exile as history while its structures persist in the present. The radio emerged as a way to address this simultaneity of displacement, opening a space where past and present could speak to each other.

From this perspective, Radio Elsewheres is a situated act of transmission. The project unfolds as a continuous relay between the intimate and the infrastructural, tracing the routes through which people, sounds, and memories travel, embracing radio’s capacity to connect without fixing. In its founding context, this gesture functions as both a memorial and a psychic medium.

Currents

The cowrie shell (Monetaria moneta) has been used as pre-colonial currency or a form of exchange in many parts of the world, including China, North America, India, and most famously British West Africa, where it remained accepted currency until the early 20th century. After writing down the anecdote about the shell-as-jingle-bell, I searched for its source but I couldn’t find it, even though I had been repeating it for years. At some point, my mind assembled fragments of information: true enough to be believable, and therefore repeatable. “I heard it somewhere.” As language moves, it fractures, dissolves and forms new associations.

The word “currency” comes from the Medieval Latin “currentia,” meaning “a flowing.” It circulates around the globe, pooling where trust temporarily takes hold, flooding some landscapes and leaving others dry. The artefacts and effects of these movements are economic, yet the language used to describe them often mirrors that of the climate crisis.

In 1969, the Rouge River near Detroit caught fire from the buildup of oil-soaked debris and waste floating on its surface. In the subsequent decades, workers attempting to clean up the river recovered a DMC DeLorean, the lost anchor of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, six eighteenth-century cannons, and a bronze statue of a nude woman.

Radio Elsewheres’ base channel traces the Windsor–Detroit border, positioned on land that is the traditional territory of the Anishnaabeg people of the Three Fires Confederacy (Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa) and many other Indigenous people who continue to call it their home. Some of them referred to the area by the river as Wawiiatanong or Wawiiatanong Ziib which means “where the river bends” in Anishinaabemowin. A trading route before and after colonization, it was once also a pathway for enslaved people escaping the United States and later for liquor smugglers during Prohibition. It is both a literal and symbolic channel, a threshold between realities and a shared atmospheric basin, but sound is indifferent to border regimes: the wave moves as it pleases, following gradients of humidity, pressure, and interference.

The river that separates Windsor from Detroit also connects them through hydroacoustic continuity. In the project, underwater hydrophones placed in the river at Windsor-Detroit and also at Walpole Island First Nation capture the murmurs of water, sounds that don’t care for the geopolitical divide (1). Often, as you tune in to Radio Elsewheres, you hear crickets, dogs barking at sunset, shuffling through grasses and rocks, and the steady rush of the river in the background (2).

Natural recordings have long been positioned in contrast to the destructive rhythms of life elsewhere. In 1942, the BBC recorded cellist Beatrice Harrison in the countryside when, one evening, her playing was joined by a nightingale, and later by the low hum of RAF bombers overhead, as if protecting the fragile scene. For people in London, immersed in wartime production and farewells, the broadcasts evoked the pastoral fantasy they believed they were fighting for: civility, tradition, music, women, nature, and the open air where birds could still sing, far from the city and the war. But the scene was staged, perhaps not maliciously but in the spirit of persuasion. During the war, radio played many roles. It was also the first mass medium used by Hitler, and later Stalin, as a political technology, allowing them to be in several places at once, never in person yet always present, the men behind the curtain.

There’s no place like home

Radio reaches beyond vision, expanding imagination without visual proof. It is both acousmatic and intimate.3 Early radio relied on directional microphones, contained rooms, and close proximity; later technologies captured wider soundscapes, yet broadcasts retained the telephone’s conversational timbre.The countless noises and voices of radio were always present, we only needed a way to tune in. Sound technology shares roots with military systems: unseen, hard to grasp, yet commanding. It evokes awe and a sense of continuity. It is also deeply proletarian, one of the few remaining ways ordinary people broadcast their voices, however fleeting or trivial.4 When I tune in, I know that somewhere, someone is living their life, minding their own business. That continuity, a faint and constant signal, is my proof of life. Even when it feels suspended or distant, amid loss or ecological decay, there remains a trace of the living world, carried through sound, unfolding somewhere, elsewhere, slowly and surely, alongside the transformations that threaten both human history and all life on this planet.

There is another anecdote I heard, and it’s that the human blood has a mineral and salt composition that is remarkably similar to seawater, which fuels questions of philosophical co-alescence between humans and their environment, especially when that environment becomes uninhabitable. The whelk shell is made from a combination of materials coming from the animal’s blood and the seawater around it. As it grows, it creates a spiral turning outwards to keep up with the animal. Later shell fragments turn into sand, and sand into deserts; each grain of sand is made from microscopic pieces of countless shells, and the ocean floor is their mass cemetery. The shell, when it appears as a fossil, witnesses eras. Yet at some point, it was also a home.

Xenia Benivolski

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(1) The same rivers that sustain life also enforce jurisdiction. Working between the Spree in Berlin and the Detroit River, Kate Donovan uses hydrophones and short-wave transmitters to trace the currents of water as political borders. naakita f.k.’s The rain remembers its life as sea extends this fluid thinking to a planetary scale, through layered recordings of storms, oceanic noise, and voice, the work listens to the circulation of water as memory, echoing the cycles of migration.

(2) Anthony Di Fazio’s As She Leaves This Place We Call Home is composed of the sounds of the Tagus canal, recorded on the day his grandmother passed away.

(3) In Ferida Abdagić’s Her Silent Home, radio mediates postwar memory through the intimacy of the domestic, is at once anonymous and distinct. Words bear traces of an individual life, yet in the accumulation of suffering too vast to comprehend, they merge into the collective and the interchangeable, stripped of identity by the scale of loss.

(4) Mirna Doyle’s Into Which Narrative Was I Born? Analyzes archival propaganda to question how national and personal histories are transmitted.