You Are So Sound! is a five month one-to-one mentorship program for emerging or experienced authors and audio artists of any age.
Do you have an idea for an audio piece or a work-in-progress you need support for? We are looking for you! If you are willing to learn and share your creative process with an experienced mentor, you are in the right place!
Three audio makers will be selected to work with the YASS! 2021 mentors Katharina Smets, Rikke Houd, Alessandra Eramo and Tempo Reale, between February and June 2021, in order to complete their audio piece before the summer.
Each mentee will be paired with one mentor whom we think will enhance their work. Our aim is to create a space for mutual creative exchange that supports the individual process of the author.
Mentors will respect who you are and what you do but they will also positively challenge you to go beyond your production comfort zone and this means to be fully aware of what the audio materials allow you to do and to which extent you can push their boundaries. That’s also why Tempo Reale will mentor you all, through sound composition and audio design.
It’s a big step into the unknown to be open to such a professional and personal exchange but try to imagine the rich and surprising dialogue you might be engaged in!
What do the mentees get from YASS!?
• 40 hours of the mentorship program
to be scheduled according to the needs of both mentees and mentors
• Co-production grant: €1.200/each
• Four digital masterclasses with international audio makers
The masterclasses will be organized in collaboration with Oorzaken Festival and Atelier de création sonore et radiophonique
• Support to the international circulation of the final productions
• Presentation of the productions at LUCIA Festival 2021
The Authors will keep the rights to their works, but will grant Radio Papesse and LUCIA Festival the permission/right to make them accessible online - on radiopapesse.org and luciafestival.org - in the frame of related events (such as educational programs, listening sessions…) and to use them for non-commercial uses in general.
The mentors
Alessandra Eramo
Alessandra Eramo is a sound artist and vocalist based in Berlin. She works with performance and installation, text-sound composition, video and drawing, exploring latent acoustic territories of the human voice and noise as socio-political matter.
Combining visual art and contemporary music, she develops artistic projects and live-performances that address questions of the body, memory and identity, often adopting participatory actions, field recording, site-specific modes, and experimental approaches to composition. Central to her practice is extending the voice in all its forms and implications in sonic and visual contexts.
She has exhibited and performed widely at festivals, museums, galleries and institutions such as: SAVVY Contemporary Berlin, Deutschlandfunk Kultur Klangkunst, Liminaria/Manifesta12 Palermo, Tempo Reale Festival Firenze, 6th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, Transmediale Berlin, Heroines of Sound Festival Berlin, Museum FLUXUS+ Potsdam, Roulette New York, Padiglione Italia nel Mondo/54th Venice Biennale.
Her radiophonic piece Tanz Sediment (2020) was commissioned and broadcast by Deutschlandfunk Kultur.
Katharina Smets
Katharina Smets is a radio producer, performer and scholar based in Antwerp. She molds documentary materials into live performances, sound guides and radio productions.
With her transmedia collective The Space Between she explores the combinations of sound and live music, video and spoken word. Fascinated by memories and archives, her collaborations with other artists and musicians invariably start from a shared need to give voice to vulnerable or forgotten stories.
Currently working on a PhD in the arts, Katharina teaches audio storytelling at the Royal Conservatoire in Antwerp. She is a proud co-founder of MIRP, the Meeting of Independent Radio Producers.
Katharina produced work for theatre, musical ensembles and broadcast such as: STUK Leuven, muziektheater LOD & Vooruit Gent, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam, BBC World Service, VRT in Belgium and VPRO in the Netherlands. She is currently working on an artistic podcast in collaboration with the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, full of stories and music.
Rikke Houd
Rikke Houd is an independent Danish radio maker working in the field of crafted audio storytelling and documentary art. She came into radio from writing, drawn to it by listening to features from the Danish Montage Group (a department at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation where the genre of “radiomontage” was developed since the 1930´s). These documentary radio pieces were like novels - literary works in sound. They were cinematographic, poetic, layered, rhythmic.
After completing an MA in Radio at Goldsmiths College in 1998, she worked for the Montage Group and also its experimental off-spring Ultralyd and have worked with sound and storytelling since - in radio and podcast, theatre, exhibition, location/site specific work and in collaboration with other artforms and fields. She also coaches and teaches workshops which focus on documentary storytelling and radiophonic awareness.
As an audio storyteller, she is occupied with what happens in the meeting between the authentic material – voices, sounds, moments - and the creative shaping of the story, the fluidity of sound and the radiophonic space. How do we find our own voice as storytellers and how do we utilize the uniqueness of the sound medium?
Tempo Reale
Founded by Luciano Berio in Florence in 1987, Tempo Reale is now one of the main European reference points for research, production and educational activities in the field of new musical technologies and electronic music.
Its main subjects of research reflect the polyhedral attitude of Tempo Reale towards music: the conception of great musical events, the study of real time sound processing and of the interaction between sound and space, the synergy between creativity, scientific competence, performative and educational rigour.
Who's been selected? Mentees 2021
Between December 2020 and January 2021 we received over 100 submissions to the YASS! mentorship programme.
It has been an overwhelming answer both from acknowledged artists and new authors who have answered to our call from all over Europe and the Mediterranean with a mosaic of local and universal features, timeless tales and urgent stories arising from our interesting times, individual and collective concerns and dreams.
To choose three projects only was a difficult feat, it was a work of subtraction, sometimes a bitter one, but we are happy to award the YASS! Mentorship to Jasmina Al-Qaisi, Kate Donovan, Studiolanda (Giorgia Cadeddu + Vittoria Soddu) and we are glad they will count on the guidance of Alessandra Eramo, Katharina Smets, Rikke Houd and Tempo Reale.
These three audio makers - all coming from very diverse backgrounds and experiences - have presented three projects that in terms of subject, intent or language respond to our request for narrative experimentation.
Three poetically political projects - even though they are not openly so - that tell stories of solidarity care and collaboration.
We do always learn a lot from juries, and so we want to thank the mentors for being able to listen and see beyond our perspectives, and above all we thank all the participants who dedicated their time to YASS!
We discovered widespread, vital communities and unexpected scenes of audio makers, young producers, exciting artists and stories worth telling.
We're sure we'll meet again, thank you all!
Radio Papesse
(Carola Haupt & Ilaria Gadenz)
Jasmina Al-Qaisi
mentor: Alessandra Eramo
Jasmina Al-Qaisi is a writer and archivist. She writes as she speaks in her own English, caught between sound and visual poetry, often stepping out of ordinary norms of form. She investigates intersections between body politics, intimacy, digitally mediated relationships, voice and memory, homes and aways, often in close communication with her grandmother. She recently inaugurated the archival methodology for performance and radio format Behind Shelves as part of the art and project space SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin and published the poetry album Archival Regrets.
She transfers poetry in performative acts and sound with gastronomy into radio formats, most frequently she conducts an on-going radio and culinary research titled Bites.
Kate Donovan
mentor: Katharina Smets
Kate Donovan is a practicing radio artist, facilitator and researcher based in Berlin. With questions of science-fact, the imagined, physical immersion and the ‘environment’ in mind, both her academic research and artistic practice are explorations of radio as a natural phenomenon, an artistic medium, and a site for resistance. Her artistic practice also deals with radio in an elemental sense, in terms of frequency, transmission and interconnectedness (but also disruption and interference). Her editorial and organisational work in free and community radio fosters inclusion and experimentation.
Recent projects include: Datscha Radio 17, a garden radio art festival on the future of the garden in the anthropocene; 'The Bespoke Headpiece', a speculative telling of radio history and the ongoing radio show 'elements'
Studiolanda
(Giorgia Cadeddu+Vittoria Soddu)
mentor: Rikke Houd
STUDIOLANDA is a multidisciplinary duo based in Sardinia, whose members both, in the specificity of their own research, put practices of “reuse” at the centre of their projects.
Giorgia Cadeddu and Vittoria Soddu have come together two years ago, with a first collaboration for the festival Foghiles and have since been working side by side, on shared and individual projects.
Studiolanda is also a physical place where their two adjacent desks stand, allowing for this continuous dialogue to happen.
How to participate (deadline 17.01.21)
In order to participate, you are required to fill in the participation form and to include in it the address of a shared folder (Dropbox, GDrive, One Drive...) with:
• your portfolio
Put all the info into a document (in English), you may include links for us to listen to
• an audio self portrait (max 2 minutes)
How would you describe yourself in sound?
• project synopsis
What is your project about? What is it that you'd like to work on during the Mentorship Program?
• if you're already in the middle of your production, please include an excerpt of your draft audio (max 5 minutes)
• 15 € entry fee payment receipt [if you're a student, you don't have to pay it]
[via Paypal or wire transfer to
Unicredit Banca
Agenzia: Firenze Nazario Sauro
IBAN: IT 06 J 02008 02836 000401118520
BIC SWIFT: UNCRITM1F13]
All these infos will help us not only to select the mentees but also to pair you with the mentors. The more we know about you, the better to foresee significant collaborations and enriching turning points in your productions.
DEADLINE: January 17th 2021 @ 11PM (CET)
**We are all from diverse latitudes and we welcome every language, but we do ask you to keep our communication in English.
Disclaimer: review of applicants will begin in mid-January, and all applicants will be notified by early February regarding the selection.