Friday, 23 May 2025, 13:00–15:00 / Casco HQ & online
Listen live on www.stranded.fm
On Friday, 23 May, we organize a sonic solidarity program performed by the students of the Transdisciplinary Studies class at HKU MAFA, streamed live from 13:00 on Utrecht’s community radio station Stranded FM.
This broadcast follows from an exercise in thinking with—with Palestine, with each other, and with the textures and rhythms of the everyday. In their class, the students engaged in a process that invites them to consider the everyday as a site of solidarity—not through abstraction, but through the personal: the objects, stories, routines, rhythms, and memories that quietly shape how we relate to ourselves and the world.
This mode of reflection carries particular weight as we enter the 78th year since the Nakba—a rupture marked by colonial erasure, mass displacement, and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, whose effects persist and intensify in the ongoing genocide. In this unfolding, the everyday is continuously eroded. Each of us relates differently: some through regional resonance or shared struggle, others from within systems shaped by complicity.
Through this pedagogical exercise, students enter a terrain of the familiar and cherished as a metaphorical point of departure. Their work activates the interplay between the singular and the collective, a relational practice that reveals what it means to be confronted with absence, and to hold onto fragile memory. In doing so, they open poetic yet tangible pathways to think (and feel) with loss and resistance. It becomes, in turn, a shared gesture against the forgetting of the Palestinian people, of their indigenous land and culture.
The performance is durational and open-ended—lasting around two hours, but flowing beyond fixed time through play and spontaneous collage. We invite you to listen with us as we put forth samples, snippets, readings, and collective jamming.
Participating students are Emily Ghazal, Ari Ralph, Genevieve Hayes, Maria Tzekaki, Yishu Huang, Anya Palamartschuk, Wanci Jiang, Yee Xu, Levin Zimmerman, Fatemeh Bagheri Toodeshki, Andra Stoica, Stijn van Casteren, João Zerquera Da Silva, Silvia Hornsveld Cáliz, Floor Piper, Charlie Zheng, Jasper Cao, Rinat Orkash Wuerkaixi, and Rouah Almefalani, with exercises developed and led by Nuraini Juliastuti and Christina della Giustina, HKU MAFA course leaders and educators, and radio transmission and direction guided by Luke Cohlen, sonic practitioner and member of the Casco Art Institute team.
The resulting recording is a collective, experimental sound piece and becomes material for retransmission through befriended radio stations and programs across our networks, as we seek ways of collective archiving with the group afterwards.
The students’ participation in Radio Solidarity serves as a concluding event where the two research projects of the Transdisciplinary Studies – An Inventory of Sound Heritage (TDPSH) and F.I.R.E. | Edition 06 – together transmit a day of independence and related fora for sending, engendering, and giving as well as receiving, getting, and taking.
The day before, on Thursday, 22 May, Radio Climate Kitchen takes place at Casco — a day-long public assembly of workshops led by the same class of Year 1 MAFA students. Through experimental sessions on archives, gravity, memory, and multisensory presence, the students explore the politics of inheritance, connection, and care in times of fragmentation and urgency. Read more on that program here.
