Radio espacio estacion broadcast Fordlândia

Abstract

On September 16th and 17th, 2017, the nomadic online radio station radioee broadcast from Fordlândia, today a district of the city of Aveiro, state of Pará, in the Brazilian Amazonia. Produced by artist Augustina Woodgate along with cultural producers Stephanie Sherman and Hernan Woodgate and several other partners in every new location, Radio Espacio Estacion/radioee was conceived as a multilingual, mobile, online radio station set up around 24-hour/36-hour long events broadcast from different parts of the world to discuss issues of migration, mobility, transportation, environment, and climate change. In Transmissão Fordlândia, radioee revisited the legendary history of the site’s foundation by the Ford Motor Company in 1927. The broadcast questions the official narrative of desertion after Ford’s enterprise failed, which implies ideas of underdevelopment associated with a colonial modern economy of representation of Latin America. Adopting live and online radio communication, based on immediacy, synchronicity, and accessibility, Transmissão Fordlândia combined research, interviews, and first-hand descriptions of the site in a continual multilingual conversation, producing a non-linear narrative enriched with a bustling soundscape of people, birds, water, motorcycles, boats, and everyday activities, transmitted to a global audience. This paper investigates how Transmissão Fordlândia articulates an ecocritical approach to space through site-oriented practices and sonic-spatial imagination, challenging colonial modern representations of tropical landscapes based on spatial rationalization and the duality of culture–nature. This paper also explores the sonic-spatial effects of live radio transmission as an aesthetic device for imagining place.