Radio drama and Sound walk
Saturday 17. 9. 2022, at 19:00
Gathering point: Ljubljana main railway station entrance north, bus
Registration required: info@cona.si
Duration: 2 h

Photo: Alisa OLEVA, CONA archive.

The work was conceived as a radio broadcast. At the same time, we asked the listeners to devote a special undivided slot of time to the act of listening. We invited them to listen to it as a walking performance while taking a stroll in a park, a forest or a field. By listening in one’s own walking pace, a very different presence and openness is achieved, opening up a rare space for the listener, where important questions about the human relationship with the Other are triggered.

The documentary sound walk The Voice of Jackal departs from a case study of the migration routes of the Canis aureus species, which has recently spread from the Balkans to Europe. The growing numbers of jackal have triggered conflicts related to human interests. The authors sum different discourses, field recordings, and composed sound landscapes to reflect the relationship between human culture and non-human species (the Other). Special attention is paid to the research of sensory language and the physicality of sound experience. Inventing a voice capable of representing the one who has none, the work unfolds into another organization of temporality, which requires a different kind of presence, attention, listening.

We explore how to introduce the nonverbal, sound narrative of the Other into the norm of the hierarchically organized human discourse of »managing« the Other, in this case the inhuman species Canis aureus L. We wanted to translate this reversal of the human-nonhuman positions into the directing-dramaturgical-musical procedures. Without imposing anthropomorphisms, we wanted to give the sound of the Other the power of voice and to place it in the sound landscape as equivalent to words. The work thus moves away from the primacy of the word and meaning, and dramaturgically leads to the disintegration of logos towards a more sensual address of the spectator/listener.

Saška RAKEF is a playwright and director. An important part of her oeuvre are projects that are created at the intersection of radio and theater art, as well as those that are based on the research and translation of radiophonic principles and/or principles of musical composition into directing and dramaturgical procedures and writing procedures for theatre and radio. Her work was presented at domestic and foreign festivals, for which she received several nominations and awards.

Bojana ŠALJIĆ PODEŠVA spends most of her time as a composer on the research of sound as an entity that affects the listener both physically and through the content; her music thus spans between complete abstraction and complex semantic languages. She received several awards for her concert works, theatre and film music.

Tina KOZIN studied at the Faculty of Arts, majoring in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory. In 2002, she received the Faculty’s Prešeren Award for her first thesis, Fictionality as a Special Form of Modality. The centre of her creative and scientific interests has always been language with its sound and semantic dimension and its interaction, recently increasingly enhanced by an interest in sound as such, as a phenomenon that – either positively or negatively – characterizes everything alive. She has published four high-profile books of poetry, participated in many domestic and foreign festivals, and her poetry has been translated into nine foreign languages. She also writes proposals for drama literary shows and audio-poetic performances.

Sebastijan LAMUT is an ecologist, a nature lover. While studying Ecology and Biodiversity at the Faculty of Biotechnology, he realized that he was interested in bioacoustics, because he believes that there is still much hidden in animal language. He participated in several international projects, symposia, radio broadcasts and publications in other media while researching the studied species Canis aureus.

Download the radio play transcript

Colophon:
Direction: Saška RAKEF
Script: Saška RAKEF, Tina KOZIN
Music: Bojana ŠALJIĆ PODEŠVA
Sound design: Matjaž MIKLIČ
Dramaturgy: Pia BREZAVŠČEK
Field recordings, sound ambients and effects: Matjaž MIKLIČ, Martin FLORJANČIČ
Expert collaboration: Petra VEBER
Translation: Sonja BENČINA, Špela BIBIČ, Pia BREZAVŠČEK
Interpretation: Barbara KRANJC AVDIĆ, Vesna JEVNIKAR, Blaž ŠEF, Nataša ŽIVKOVIČ, Aleksander GOLJA, Ivan LOTRIČ
Production: Ingrid KOVAČ BRUS (Editor-in-Chief), Alen JELEN (Editor)
Radio Slovenija, Program Ars & društvo za umetnost AVGUS, Ljubljana, 2020
Thanks to: Sebastijan LAMUT, M.Sc., Miha KROFL, Sc.D., Tomaž GRUŠOVNIK, Ph.D.