Prison Radio

PRISON RADIO is an international, transdisciplinary sound and radio art project that rethinks both prison and radio as social, political, and artistic structures. Taking the Former Prishtina Prison as a resonant site, the project approaches the prison not only as a historical institution of confinement, but also as a metaphor for wider invisible architectures of limitation: social roles, gender norms, borders, political pressure, economic constraint, trauma, language, surveillance, and silence. Through radio art, sound walks, live broadcasts, performances, talks, and collective listening formats, PRISON RADIO transforms a former site of punishment into a temporary space of voice, resistance, and public reflection.

The festival draws on critical prison studies, the politics of listening, sound studies, prison without walls and carceral continuum. It understands radio as a dissident and participatory medium through voices, art and sounds that travel beyond walls, borders, and dominant narratives. Listening is understood here not as a passive act of reception, but as an political practice: a way of attending to voices, silences, artistic formulations, and sonic traces that are often excluded from dominant public narratives and looks at opening channels to question dominant discourses on boundaries of societal spaces. In this sense, PRISON RADIO does not simply represent unheard voices, but opens a space where voices, memories, bodies, and sounds can appear on their own terms.

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The festival will take place from 10–13 September 2026 in Prishtina, Kosovo, with the Former Prishtina Prison as its central site and additional activities in public spaces across the city. The programme will include live radio sessions, site-specific artistic interventions, sound walks, masterclasses, public talks, community radio exchanges, documentation, archiving, and rebroadcasting.

Participating artists, researchers, and contributors include:

Adina Camhy, Andrés Arizmendy Benavides, Eli Krasniqi, Elsa Demo, Hazir Reka, Juan Camilo Herrera Casilimas, Knut Aufermann, Labinot Kelmendi, Liburn Jupolli, Maja Zeco, Nina Wetzel, Orgest Azizi, Sarah Washington, Thomas Krempke and other local and regional as well as international artists, former prisoners, researchers, musicians, and community radio practitioners.

Partners include:

Stralli, Lumpen Station, Kolektiv Radio, Molla e Kuqe, Former Prishtina Prison, and further cultural, academic, and community radio partners from Kosovo, the Western Balkans, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Austria, Germany, and beyond.