Slowing Down to Infrastructures - Conversations on Slowness (July 1 – October 19, 2025)

This Tuesday on our 12:00 CET FM slot on Colaboradio / Freies Radio Berlin Brandenburg we release the episode of Conversations on Slowness, as part of Radio Otherwise's "Slowing Down to Infrastructures", commisioned for the Copenhagen Architecture Biennale.

This series of conversations weaves into the durational livestream “slowing down to infrastructures”, a six months long radio show commissioned for the 2025 Copehagen Architecture Bienalle that generatively programs live streams from the everyday rhythms that sustain the Copenhagen Architecture Forum's facilities. The dialogic form of the conversations starts from a simple premise: to converse on slowness and temporality in a single take. The exchanges often unfold at a meandering pace, allowing ideas to surface gradually—an intentional contrast to the speed and structure of commercial radio. Conversations will be released incrementally, building momentum in the lead-up to the Biennial in October. Fragments of different lengths will also be integrated into the larger composition, contributing to the work’s evolving sonic and temporal structure.

The first conversation of the series is "Fermented Chestnut in deep balcony time - a conversation about slowness with Lucie Schroeder and florence freitag". It will be aired on Tuesday 12:00 (CET) on our webradio and at https://www.cafx.dk/biennial/ and on FM in Berlin 88,4.

The release and replay schedule for Conversations on Slowness is carefully designed to align with both natural rhythms of the day and the project's gradual deceleration theme. The original episodes are released between July 1 and October 8, 2025, following a progressively intensifying release rhythm (starting monthly, moving toward weekly and then bi-weekly releases). Each episode enters a multi-phase replay cycle, timed according to real solar phases in Copenhagen (CEST time) on each given day. The goal is to allow listeners multiple entry points for each conversation while reflecting natural shifts in time and light.
The replay structure for Conversations on Slowness follows the natural daily rhythms of Copenhagen, with each episode reappearing at key solar moments: Sunrise, Meridian (solar noon), Sunset, and sometimes Dusk, depending on the episode's timing. The frequency of replays decreases over the season: early episodes (July–August) are replayed more often and over a longer time span, while later episodes (September–October) have fewer, more focused replays—ensuring the full series concludes by October 19, 2025.
Episode 1 originally releases on July 1 at 12:00, with replays on July 2 at 04:32, July 4 at 13:13, July 6 at 21:54, July 11 at 13:11, July 15 at 22:43, August 3 at 05:48, August 19 at 13:07, September 6 at 19:17, September 19 at 13:00, September 26 at 20:06, October 3 at 07:32, and October 15 at 13:01.

Archipel e.V is a small arts and culture association registered within the german requirments, according to which we assigned as our main purpose advocating for tolerance in all areas of culture and the concept of international understanding, especially supporting the emancipation of entities that have been pushed to the margins.

In the last months we have watched consecutive war crimes being commited by Israel backlashing Hamas horrendous attentat on October 7th 2023. We have watched powerful governments, in particular the German, support inconditionally and financially an offensive in Palestine that is unjustifiable. We watched hate speech profaned by the mouths of people in charge. We watched hundreds of international human rights organisations desperately denoucing an on-going massacre. We have watched protests, especially in Berlin, that in no way endorsed Hamas - instead mourne and demanded respect to human rights - be violently supressed. We have watched police reinforcement of racial profiling and provocations to the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim communitites living in Berlin. We have watched a quick escalation of discrimitation and ignorant statements about Arabs and Muslims, specially inside schools, from educational staff and school communities. We have watched german art and educational institutions, when at all making public statements, show solidarity to the losses of Israel and silence about what is happening in Palestine. We confirm a complex set of silencing mechanisms at play against those that are critical of mainstream narratives.

Hereby we publicly declare our devastation about this situation and that we do not agree with the ways the German government and the German cultural and academic circuit has acted so far. We are disapointed and specially revolted by the discrepancy between all the decolonial discourse that has permeated the arts - a staging in which all members of our organisation have acted upon - and the general retraction to a brutal scenario that blows up the main injustices and power inequalities decolonization fights against. We understand there are many mechanisms for silencing at play, still, we cannot accept the submission to this oppression of speech and criticism. We call specially the german voices to work out through their reasons not to speak up and use their locus of speech that is of particular relevance to the injustices exploding in the last months and to the extreme-right agenda that is taking over more and more space.

We would like also to call attention to the many ways in which this current crisis reinforce mechanisms of polarization and separation between people all over the world. Archipel will put its efforts in maintaing its open channel for all voices and contuining to produce spaces of encounter in times of further increase in broken relationships. Inasmusch as we feel we must speak out against the current upmost injustices, we also need to stay aware of the importance of connectivity and cross-communication in the sight of a large aparatus that is trying to disrupt valuable interpersonal relationships. We want to contribute to free and diverse media environment and foster cultures of listening that produce empathy and respect.

CEASE FIRE NOW. REPAIR.

p.s. We keep changing at the beginning of this statment days, for weeks, for months... now it's a year and a few months since.