Radio MAMUTICA – The voice of an anthill building

By: Vid Mesaric, Croatian Radio

“The logic of capitalism is that of the commodity: where ever it arrives, everything becomes commodified - even the electromagnetic waves between 87,5 to 108 MHz - the FM band - are turned into a market place.” – this fact made artistic group Ligna ponder about the possibilities of opening the airwaves for public production and setting up a temporary radio station that will interfere with the everyday life of one of the biggest buildings in the City of Zagreb – “Mamutica” – that is inhabited by more than 5000 occupants. “It is a radio not to represent certain interests but to perform a social process. The listener is activated. Exploring the everyday-life of the people living in Mamutica, the radio frequency becomes a public place for the articulation and production of desire,“ state performers and authors of the Ligna group who managed to set up a temporary studio in one of the Mamutica’s flats which was broadcasting program for four days.

The Radio Mamutica project was performed in the course of Urban Festival which deals with a concept of public, especially that of public space, through its thematic focuses, programme selection, but also through its specific, often experimental, organizational schemes. In the social climate with intensified and hasty privatization of public spaces, namely the common meeting places, atomization of the society and strongly individualized, almost intimate reception of the cultural products, in the era of technological innovations that encourage and stimulate passivity, the crucial point is to reopen and affirm spaces of collective consummation, spaces of greater accessibility, as well as spaces of active participation of broader audience/public.

The free radio group LIGNA consists of the media theorists and radio artists Ole Frahm, Michael Hüners and Torsten Michelsen, working in the broadcast station Freies Sender Kombinat, a free, non-commercial, local radio station in Hamburg. Since 1999 LIGNA examins the meaning of dispersion in and of radio, relating to forgotten or isolated utilizations of this medium to develop new practices and since 2002 LIGNA is developing concepts of how radio can intervene in public and often controlled spaces, so that their public reappears as uncontrollable situation.

Vid Mesaric from Croatian Radio spoke to Ole Frahm from Ligna group.