Radio Begijnenstraat: a radiophonic delirium

Abstract

Radio Begijnenstraat is an ongoing audio project on the psychiatric ward of the Antwerp prison in Belgium. For ten years now, NGO hell-er organises creation and recording sessions every week. Under the guidance of an artist, the residents work on a radio episode. The result is a podcast of about forty-five minutes: a cut-and-paste montage representing two months of prison time ranging from life stories to poetry, own texts and music, to performance, drama, and improvisation. Every year Radio Begijnenstraat produces six episodes and every month it broadcasts on local FM radio and digital radio online. In this article, I will describe how our project as a transferential medium introduces an empty non-existent space (the ether) that may be freely filled. We find that clients are naturally and actively confronted with different kinds of representations and derivations of the clinical transference. Also, there is the act of recording, preserving, juggling, and fixing. It is a reference to a fragment of a post-dramatic radiophonic narrative that is realised with editing and later listened to. Not only do we make radio for an invisible audience, we also listen to ourselves and that is the mirror, even during the creation of the episodes.