Guerilla radio, guerilla everything

It has to start sometime. What better place than here, what better time than now?

The first grant I ever wrote was for an internet radio project. We didn’t end up implementing half of the activities that we had written in the grant– but we did create a multi-ethnic youth radio team which continued to create radio programming several years after the grant ended. While bringing together Croats and Bosniaks in a divided city, we also brought together punks, hiphoppers and metalheads! There are challenges to implementing truly participatory community radio programming, like teenage hosts getting drunk on the air. (But at least they were doing it together, as a multi-ethnic team! Ha.)

Our technician had never done internet radio before he started ours. He’s my hero. He literally created the radio station with google searches and duct tape. There was a constant battle with rain leaking directly on all our equipment. Solution: plastic garbage bags and more duct tape.

That’s pretty much how we did everything else too. No one was a professional journalist. I started a show about Bosnian music in order to learn more about it. I researched new artists before each show and interviewed all kinds of people– retirees, little kids, professional musicians, academics. We were driven by our curiosity.

I want to keep that guerrilla spirit in everything I do.

Here’s the jingle for my radio show, Fildzan Sevdaha, which a friend made for me. It starts with a song by a Mostar 80s heavy metal band, Monolit, and ends with a recital of a Bosnian poem by anthropologist/musicologist Himzo Polovina. Later I’ll write more about the show and share some of the interviews I did.