‘Many Voices, Resonating from Different Times and Spaces’: a Script for an Imaginary Radiophonic Piece on Janete El Haouli

Abstract

What follows is the creation of a script for an imaginary radiophonic piece on the Brazilian sound artist Janete El Haouli (1955–), a key radio art reference in Latin America. Author of various radiophonic pieces, she also created and directed the radio programme Música Nova: Rádio para Ouvidos Pensantes (New Music: Radio for Thinking Ears), which was transmitted between 1991 and 2005 by Rádio UEL (Londrina State University’s radio station). Both her pieces as well as her programme move away from the traditional radio model in which the listener is understood as a passive receiver. What El Haouli proposes is not a radio as mere medium of transmission, but rather an experimental radio that invites the listener to perform a reflexive and imaginative listening. While inspired by this latter model, we, Valéria Bonafé and Lílian Campesato, have here developed a script for an imaginary radiophonic programme seeking not only to present Janete El Haouli, the artist, to the reader/listener—her biography, her works and poetics—but also to invite this reader/listener to participate in a network of intersubjective listening combining different agents and narrative lines. The script presents five sound works by El Haouli and a selection of fragments of an audio testimony where she reflects autobiographically on her life. The script also collects three affective reports from listening carried out by women artists who were impacted, in different ways, by the ethical and poetic dimensions involved in the work of El Haouli: Valéria Bonafé, Lílian Campesato and Thaís D’Abronzo. Both El Haouli’s testimony and the three affective reports1 from listening were made originally in Portuguese and were translated by the authors 969598 FER0010.1177/0141778920969598Feminist ReviewValéria Bonafé and Lílian Campesato other2021