In The Making #13: Exploring the Multidimensional Nature of Radio

June 5th – ITM #13: Exploring the Multidimensional Nature of Radio

Margherita Brillada with guests Kate Donovan and Ieva Gudaytite

As part of the In The Making series, Margherita Brillada will share insights into her ongoing artistic research and practice-based project, On Air – On Site, an international experimental community radio initiative based in The Hague. Conceived as a dynamic platform for artistic engagement and community connection, the project aligns with her broader investigation of radio’s evolving role as both an artistic and social medium. Her research explores radio as a compositional tool, developing a distinct radio poetics rooted in the medium’s sonic dimension. At the same time, she examines radio as a medium in itself, tracing its technological development and philosophical dimensions in the contemporary era. Finally, she considers its role as a social and public space, focusing on its potential to foster community and collective engagement.

For this discussion, Margherita will be joined by Kate Donovan and Ieva Gudaitytė, whose practices expand the conversation in new directions. Kate’s work engages with the ecologies of radio, exploring its entanglements with nature, transmission, and listening. She focuses on the more-than-human aspects of radio and rethinking dominant historical narratives. Ieva’s research examines how independent community music radio stations engage in civic life and cultural politics during times of socio-political change, highlighting the medium’s role in shaping collective memory and cultural narratives. Together, their intersecting perspectives will open a dialogue on the multidimensional nature of radio, inviting the audience to reflect on its unique capacity to merge artistic experimentation, technological evolution, and community-building.

Margherita Brillada is a sound artist and radio maker based in The Hague. She is a research associate at the Institute of Sonology and a PhD candidate at ACPA, University of Leiden. Her practice-based research, Re-thinking Radio Art in the Contemporary Era: Community Radio and WebRadio, explores radio as both a space for community engagement and as a compositional tool, developing a distinct radio poetics that emerges through artistic experimentation. Her practice moves between soundscape composition and radio-making. In producing radio artworks that search for new synergies between pure abstraction and storytelling, she pays particular attention to the urban soundscape and the anthropogenic presence in public spaces, emphasizing the role of the disembodied and acousmatic voice in radiophonic contexts.