Podcast: Radio Atlas

By Amelia Umuhire for Deutschlandfunk Kultur (2018)

Amelia Umuhire tells the story of Innocent Seminega – her father – as a young student, teacher, husband and parent up until his death at the hands of the Hutu extremists in Rwanda. Tracing her family history as she addresses him, she weaves together threads from his love of linguistics, his romance with her mother, parenthood, and life lived amidst violent conflict – until unfurling her own story of her childhood and movement between countries – critiquing the white gaze which might try and frame her family’s story.

“They called these violent outbreaks, when the President was overthrown by his cousin, Juvénal Habyarimana, the ‘winds’. That’s how the Rwandan language is sometimes. Pogroms become winds, humans become cockroaches. Man-made violence becomes a force of nature and, like a bad harvest or other natural disasters, it comes and goes.”

Amelia Umuhire is a Rwandese filmmaker and artist based in Berlin. She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning web series ‘Polyglot’,which won Best German Webseries at the Webfest Berlin in 2015, the award-winning short experimental film ‘Mugabo’ and the Prix Europa nominated sound piece ‘Vaterland’ (Fatherland). Her work has been screened at the MOCA LA, MCA Chicago, Victoria and Albert Museum, 10th Berlin Biennale, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and many more.  She is a current laureate of the Villa Romana Prize in Florence, Italy and completing her first feature film.

Visit a Tehran that blossoms in language, fable and collective imagination.

By Arif Mirbaghi for Constellations (2020)

Pointing At Canopus was composed by Arif Mirbaghi and edited by Michelle Macklem and Jess Shane. It was made with the voices of over a dozen friends. Special thanks to Michael Eckert for his pedal steel improvisation and Parva Karkhaneh for her patient guidance.

The tortoise, you know, carries his house on his back. No matter how hard he tries, he cannot leave home. – The Anvār-i Suhaylī or Lights of Canopus

Arif writes:

Pointing At Canopus is a meditation on the nature of home, not in the brick-and-mortar sense, but the broader idea: a place of rest. Children of immigrants often separately compartmentalize these ideas. Home is a place we live but heritage is a space we occupy. There is a daily pivot between the cadences of interaction with our family and those of our friends or co-workers. Inevitably the lines blur, and as individuals we find ourselves on different points along a gradient.

Coming to Iran reversed this pivot for me. The language of my home life suddenly spilled out in the streets, flooded my conversations, my day to day. For the first time I was utilizing Farsi beyond the comfort of my family home— I became a Farsi speaker.

At the same time, English became a place of thoughtful saudade. I would be lulled to sleep by audiobooks. The meter and ornamentation of the language felt familiar but distant like a kind of reverb— I became an English listener.

Pointing At Canopus explores the waxing and waning of home and heritage. I hope to evoke in listeners a sense of transit. A feeling neither here nor there. The idea that home is the pivot, not the point. Sounds of moving vehicles. Extra-lingual umms & ahhs while a speaker connects sentences. ‘Here’ is a space, but ‘there’ is a mythology, a fable. We orbit our fables like atoms around a nucleus. Wherever we go, there we are again.

ARIF MIRBAGHI is a Canadian-born composer & arranger based in Tehran. He has performed with dozens of ensembles throughout the world, in styles varying from folk, jazz, progressive rock, and beyond. His work explores the relationship of disconnection and reconnection for communities in the diaspora. More from Arif on his Soundcloud and on Spotify.

Mrs Kaika Burton was born deep in the desert of Central Australia. Her mother travelled hundreds of miles barefoot before giving birth alone at a massive desert mesa called Atila – a place which became her spiritual country.

Mrs Kaika Burton was a respected and revered senior artist, educator, storyteller and cultural leader. She was also one of the few remaining poetic speakers of Pitjantjatjara, a traditional Indigenous language of Central Australia’s remote Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands. There were once more than 400 traditional languages spoken across the Australian continent, but only around 13 are still spoken by children – all threatened by policies restricting Aboriginal people from speaking their languages and the ongoing forces of colonisation.

At the age of 70, she decided to share this deeply personal story of her birth, revealing, for the first time, the traditional birthing methods that helped define her cultural life. Telling this story was part of her continuous work to protect her ancient culture, and to ensure that future generations can speak the language it lives in.

Mrs Kaika Burton passed away in 2023. While use of her full name has been restricted since this feature first appeared on Radio Atlas, she made this piece in order to share her story and language, to ensure her voice can still be heard. It continues to be, with the support of her family.

The soundscape is binaural, specifically recorded on the country of Mrs Kaika Burton’s birth, in one of the most remote parts of Australia. Therefore the piece is best experienced through headphones.

Produced by Mrs Kaika Burton

Sound, editing and co-production by Caddie Brain

By Lotta Erikson for Sveriges Radio (1996)

Recorded in the pre-internet dating days, Lotta Erikson searches for a partner through telephone contact agencies.

Lotta Erikson has been a freelance for the Swedish radio (SR) and Swedish national television (SVT) in various forms since 1992, making around 15 radio documentaries and several TV-documentaries. Her productions have been presented at festivals and have won awards. In recent years she has written scripts for both feature films and TV-series, including the TV series The Hunt for a Killer, for SVT-drama with director Mikael Marcimain. Lotta Erikson has also made several sound art installations, written stage plays, radio dramas and a book about the human voice “The Alphabet of the Voice”.

Translation by Klara Erikson

By Eva Lammelová for Czech Radio (2018)

According to numerous statistics, Czechs are a nation of dog-lovers. On average, there is a dog in every second household in the Czech Republic, resulting in the most hounds per capita in all of Europe.

In Eva’s house there’s Tonča. Tonča is Eva’s French Bulldog who lives with her and her husband in Prague’s Vinohrady district. She wants to sleep with them in their bedroom so badly that she stakes her claim by barking at their bedroom door and leaving little puddles of protest. Eva’s husband, however, is strongly against it. What do you when you have a dog at home with separation anxiety?

‘Man: A Dog’s Best Friend’ was a runner up for Best Documentary at the Prix Bohemia (2019)

Editor: Brit Jensen

Sound: Jiří Slavičínský

Director, screenwriter, and producer Eva Lammelová (1986) studied sociology and andragogy at Palacký University in Olomouc, as well as film and theater science. She filmed an episode of the series Nedej se! for Czech Television entitled Free Food For All (Ji.hlava IDFF 2015) and the documentary AsexuaLOVE (2018).