Radio Warszawa | Radio Warsaw

Multi-vocal performance scripted by Sława Harasymowicz and recorded at Freud Museum London. Actors: Dominik Czechowski, Gavin Duff, Frederick Fraser, Angus King, Ian Powell and Kuba Wesołowski. 15’03”

In June 2016, Harasymowicz created a non-public live performance in Sigmund Freud’s former study at 20 Maresfield Gardens. The out-of-hours event took the form of a radio broadcast, dramatising and re-imagining real activity that took place in a German concentration camp towards the end of the WWII. During the nights, a group of prisoners would engage in clandestine and prohibited collaboration to create fictitious ‘radio programmes’ using the structure of real broadcasts – including news bulletins, weather forecasts, sport commentary and reportage – as a way of blocking out the surrounding reality of war, incarceration, displacement and the terror of the unknown.

Referencing the Museum as a psychoanalytical-historical space, Harasymowicz’s performance produced an aural collage of performed testimonials, fiction, poetry, scientific research, experimental writing and sound distortions.

Presenting the radio broadcast for the first time publicly in the Freud Museum, and using visual materials, the artist gave a performative talk followed by an in-conversation with Dr Caterina Albano (4 December 2016).

The performance was presented to the public during ‘Radio On’ exhibition, Narrative Projects, London. 

Project curated collectively by the artist with Dominik Czechowski.