Listen back: RADIO for Collective Learning For a Shared and Just City

Listen back: RADIO for Collective Learning For a Shared and Just City: raar.mixlr.com

This two hour radio broadcast marks the closing celebration of the year long programme Collective Learning for a Shared and Just City, organised by the Afrikaanderwijk Cooperative for Culture Campus Putselaan. What unfolds is not only a radio show, but a collective tour through a year of learning, making, questioning, and building together in Rotterdam South. The Campus Studio programme consisted of a series of activities and open air classes taking place in the areas surrounding the Cultuur&Campus Putselaan, focusing on societal questions arising in the neighbourhood. Topics relating to health and wellbeing, gentrification, non-institutional knowledge, trust and community belonging, environmental sustainability and responsibility towards the environment.

With Mustapha Eaisaouiyen's powerful poem We Didn’t Move, We Were Removed as a starting point, the broadcast moves through questions around gentrification, housing, memory, community knowledge, and the role of universities in the city. “We are not gathered here to be polite… we are here to bear witness. Because silence ain’t neutral.” From there, the radio moves as a guided tour through the programme’s different #PlacesOfStudy weaving together past and present.

Throughout the show, fragments from earlier programme moments return. We hear from Davarian Baldwin, who challenges the role of institutions: “These are not just schools… these are the factories of today’s economy.”
And listen to spoken parts from the Rotterdam South Lecture #RotterdamZuidLezing, reminding us: “We are not a collection of separate voices, but a choir from the streets, houses, and hearts of our neighbourhoods.” #CooperativeConsultancyBuro with Annet van Otterloo, Mustapha Eaisaouiyen, Joshua van den Ham, Jiska Engelbert en Vanessa Umboh.

We hear the jingle, made by Dorota Márföldi-Matejová and Luke Deane, and listen back to some music and wishes made and recorded earlier during the the #LivingBreathingSpaces event, before the audience becomes part of a live sound piece, invited by Dorota and Froggr Arafat to pick up simple objects, which we turned into instruments and create a collective composition together. Elsewhere, drinks are mixed live on air by Kate Price from “waste” fruit syrups into something shared and celebratory. #WasteSimmers

In another segment, listeners are asked by Natasha Taylor to pause and imagine: “You’re holding a small fabric bag… what knowledge would you carry inside?” A story? A recipe? A memory? A question? The library, we are reminded, doesn’t only live on shelves it lives in people. #LibraryofCommunityKnowledge

We hear about gardens as classrooms by #SpinCollective (Juliette Douet, Carla Arcos and Katayun Taraporevala) with Kate Price where learning happens through soil, failure, and care. About children playing football during lectures, not as interruption, but as part of the scene. About drawing as a way of seeing the city differently by Tânia A. Cardoso. About archives that are stained, touched, and made intimate with Senka Milutinovic and Katy. About knowledge that is embodied, shared, and unfinished.

The show moves between English and Dutch, between poetry and conversation, between critique and celebration. It brings together voices of residents, artists, organisers, educators, and past programme contributors. All of whom helped shape the year long programme itself.

Running through it all is a shared urgency: to question who the city is being built for, and to insist on other ways of learning and living together. Or as one voice puts it: “Gentrification is not a force of nature… it’s a strategy.”

This broadcast is an invitation to listen back not just to what was said, but to what was practiced: collective learning as something lived: in public space, in conversation, in sound, in food, in resistance, and in care.

Tune in for “Studio for Collective Learning“ where the city speaks back, and where learning is something we build together.

Radio: raar.mixlr.com
Programmed by Kim Bouvy, Katayun Taraporevala, Janneke Absil
Presented by Kim Bouvy & Katayun Taraporevala
Hosted by Joshua Thies (RAAR Radio)