'I want to eat the earth'

This Tuesday on our weekly 12:00 CET slot on FM, 88.4 Berlin 90.7 Potsdam, we welcome the bimonthly show 'I want to eat the earth'.

A sonic almanac from the New School of the Anthropocene

NSOTA is a radical experiment in alternative education, away from marketisation and arcane specialism towards co-sensing systems change through creative practice.

This is an ecological transmission of DIY ethics, non-hierarchical structures, radical networks, interconnected sensing through sound, text, voice, spoken word, human and more-than-human collaborative practice, patchwork group thinking, and radio art.

This episode is created for the June solstice, a time of long light hours in the north, and long darkness in the south, the extremes of day and night enacting their own rhythms and textures on those who inhabit the earth. The piece is curated and produced by Stephen Shiell and composed using original material from NSOTA scholars.

Scholar contributions:

Stephen Shiell dawn chorus phenomena, recorded at Tir Ysbrydol, Wales, 2025
Simon McClelland Morris and Chris de Sel excerpt of ‘Brone’ - and/or Boundary Drone sounds out the internal machinations and infrastructural analysis that occurred on a virtual tour around the perimeter of Heathrow International Airport, summer 2024
Stephen Shiell field recording at Lisbon port, Lisbon 2025 - check
Clare Whistler & Stephen Shiell ‘Pond Song’ poem with field recordings from Clare’s sussex pond
Rhona Eve Clews Hungarian transit, field recording
Pascal Sleigh a piece borrowing from Tavener’s theme from The Lamb in order to think about mourning modern ecological loss, particularly interested in translating the uncomfortable pairing of beauty (daisies) and the unheimlich (guts) as a form of the emotional displacement that the anthropocene causes. Performed by the Quiron Quartet: Violin I - Edgar Gomes Violin II - Ricardo Vieira Viola - Jose Miguel Freitas Cello - Maria Nabiero, With many thanks to Matthew Brown and Stelios Chatziiosifidis
Rhona Eve Clews Montezuma castle, Arizona
Abi Andrews ‘Kithness’, an audio essay about cross-species care
Stephen Shiell & Clare Whistler ‘Pond Song’ poem with field recordings from Clare’s sussex pond
Michael Timmerman Paradisum Only Not - In principle, a series of quotations, starting with a Big Bang drone leading into a rendition of Fauré’s In Paradisum theme of his Requiem to interrogate the possibility of oblivion and a future without memory.
Miles Irving & Pascal Sleigh What’s happened to the humans
Chris de Sel recordings at Big Pit, Blaenafon and Lime Kiln, Clydach Gorge, with reading from Michael Bosley and Gwynne Bosley’s ‘The Lonely Shepherd’ and R.S. Thomas’s ‘Song in a Year of Catastrophe"
Rhona Eve Clews field recording, back of a cab in Latvia
Simon McClelland Morris and Chris De Sel excerpt of ‘Brone’
Rhona Eve Clews Cicada, field recording
Cole Pemberton improv of Blanc Sceol’s ‘We’re All Going to Die’ on piano with Hannah White ‘letter for…’
Stephen Shiell dawn chorus phenomena, recorded at Tir Ysbrydol, Wales, 2025

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.