Radio Art in Brazil: A Panorama of Artists and Productions
Mauro Sá Rego Costa, Adriana Gomes Ribeiro and Pedro de Albuquerque Araujo
Introduction
Since its invention, radio has been an interesting medium for many actors, including playwrights and music composers, who began thinking about new forms of artistic creation involving its media techniques and transmission possibilities. In Brazil, however, artistic creation with and for the radio took decades to emerge.
There are several possible approaches to the concept of radio art. One approach considers it to be one form of expression belonging to the broader field of “sound art.” For the panoramic overview we are proposing, we chose pieces strictly made for radio, using its particular technical tools and language. We should keep in mind that the technical transformations of radio as a medium and its expansion into the Internet are expanding and shifting understandings of what this medium is and, consequently, also modifying perspectives of what is meant by radio art (Costa 2016; Zaremba 2009; Porto 1997).
Agreeing to only consider works produced for radio with an explicit aim to expand and create languages for this medium, we suggest that the first radio art works in Brazil that meet this criteria were first created in the 1970s. In the 1990s, meetings, seminars, and publications began to address this production, reflecting on the practices of producers, artists, and musicians as well as presenting analyses of what radio can do. Among the most important dissemination of this knowledge in the period we highlight the work of three producers and researchers: Regina Porto, Lilian Zaremba, and Janete El Haouli. The last two were also responsible for the first publications that sought to create a map of radio art producers in Brazil (Bentes and Zaremba 1996, 1997, 1999; El Haouli 2006).
This article seeks to present a panoramic overview of Brazilian radio art, systematizing and expanding the inventory of available information about artists and productions while also reflecting on more recent works and projects.[1] Our interest in developing this inventory comes from the creation of an experimental radio station at the Faculdade de Educação da Baixada Fluminense at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (FEBF/UERJ) and was intensified by the development of graduate courses at this faculty when a sound studio was built as a space to experiment with educational and artistic sound productions and research developed revolving around sound and radio. An important stimulus for artists producing radio creations came with the development of Rádio Kaxinawá and Studio Kaxinawá.
We started from the understanding that the production of radio art in Brazil was only possible with the work of two public cultural and educational broadcasters: Rádio Cultura FM (São Paulo) and Rádio MEC FM (Rio de Janeiro). Thus, we present radio artists and their productions at both stations, and we point out other articulations and actors who began to develop radio art after the advent of the Internet.