Radio Grenouille, an associative radio based in Marseille and founded in 1981 by Richard Martin (director or the Toursky Theatre), has been invited to Bordeaux for a two-month residency for EVENTO 2011’s Mobile site. This independant and hybrid media will accompany the mobile unit in its urban exploration as from end of August and will create sound journals for each venue. To better understand its approach, we met Julie de Muer, curator at Radio Grenouille (Radiographie/Cartophonies project).

Radio Grenouille’s travelling team: Julie De Muer, Nelly Flecher, Jérémy Garniaux, Christophe Modica, Floriane Pochon, Tony Régnauld, Xavier Thomas.

Next stop of the mobile unit: 25 August.

1/ Describe in a few lines your project for EVENTO 2011

Radio Grenouille is a cultural and creative radio based in Marseille. For EVENTO, it is setting up camp for a few weeks to explore, observe and practice its hybrid media, taking with it journalists, film directors, sound artists, and even a cartographer, for a travelling encounter with the territory of Bordeaux and its inhabitants.

At the crossroads of a participative practice, a documentary approach and a resource function, this radio project is:

- a way to build resources for the mobile site,

- a system of artistic collecting and restitution of a sensitive feedback of the territory,

- a way of bringing people together and creating debate on different points of view and practices put forward by EVENTO.

From the end of August we will start our open exploration of the mobile site, to create a sort of sound journal. As a combination of reports and sound creation, you will find questions to be debated, some behind-the-scenes info, inhabitants that live there or are passing by, artist explorers, sound landscapes. You will be able to listen to the different episodes and subscribe to the podcasts on Grenouille’s website.

From 5 to 9 September, we will set up in Bègles for a collective exploration. Several exploration methods involving sound, media but also cartography will be brought together: we will propose for example a mental cartography workshop and “home-made” aerial maps, becoming the base of a sound collection on the notion of “proximity”.

The sound artist Christophe Modica will explore the different types of housing of the territory (the old fishing cabins, converted industrial buildings, a social housing estate).

For the restitution on 9 September, we will take over part of the semi-wild park of Mussonville.

The mobile site will set down and we will activate a live show (Perched Quarrel) dealing with new forms of habitat and ways of co-habitation, sound and visual installations conceived thanks to the exploration mentioned above, and also a Night of listening.

We can also camp or just spend a moment listing to a mixed flow of documentaries, sound creation and musical compositions that will tell us about the city in a slightly different – sometimes far-fetched – manner, between fiction and reality.

Finally, during EVENTO, our “radio HQ” will be around the unit of the mobile site. With a daily show live and in public, we will be able to dialogue with artists, project bearers, inhabitants, researchers, in situ reporters…

The travelling team: Julie De Muer, Nelly Flecher, Jérémy Garniaux, Christophe Modica, Floriane Pochon, Tony Régnauld, Xavier Thomas.

2/ For Michelangelo Pistoletto, art has to be at the center of responsible social change. Can you comment in regards to your project for EVENTO 2011?

As a cultural media coming from the movement of free radio, Radio Grenouille built itself through the exploration of the relationship between art and society, and in a practice of individual and collective activism. By using the communication field as an information field but also a space for poetic, social and political practices, Grenouille offers new forms of creative mediation and/or creation processes that forge bonds, not only with their production mode but also thanks to their formal result.

At a time that announces the end of a certain form of “autonomy” of art, as predicted in the 20^th century, and where the temptation is paradoxically big to use art more as an aspect of territorial marketing, it is fundamental to bring to light the importance of the role of some artistic approaches to propose and experiment new paradigms (living together, the creation of common goods, the transformation of the city…). Grenouille tries to do this, by relaying this approach and by also putting them to practice with its own tools (sound, communication).

3/ What do you hope will remain of EVENTO2011 after the biennial?

Tools (intellectual, for venues, methods of cooperation…) and new means for the Bordelais.