Nicolás Jaar

With a duration of three and a half hours, divided into 17 episodes, Radio Piedras Archives is a complex weave of acoustic strategies, with a variety of latent political messages behind its multitemporal narratives. In the first three episodes, we hear the story of a boy who disappears in the Chilean desert, which is soon revealed to be only the first layer of the narrative as spectral beings and nonhuman perspectives begin to seep through.
 
By the fourth episode, we come to understand the boy’s story is actually the piece “Desliz” by the composer Salinas Hasbún (whose name is an homage to Jaar’s grandmothers, Graciela Salinas and Miriam Hasbún). The two hosts of Radio Piedras recount that Salinas Hasbún disappeared on October 25, 2022, after setting out on a hike from Santiago to Valparaíso, but not before having left behind a series of unheard songs, which they share over the course of the piece. Salinas Hasbún’s story is then situated in a broader uchronic context: we find ourselves in an indeterminate near future in which the Internet-based telecommunications network has collapsed.

The anarchist collective Las 0cho has claimed responsibility for this digital blackout through their Living Fossil action: no industry has remained intact while certain old technologies, such as computers, automobiles and radio itself, went from being obsolete to absolutely necessary.
 
Since then, a global network of clandestine radio stations arose—including Radio Piedras, where Las 0cho (and some unexpected nonhuman allies) release their communiqués, periodically heard through voices distorted to protect their identities from surveillance technology. As they share the work of Salinas Hasbún, the hosts of Radio Piedras describe the revolutionary global situation, with uprisings in different parts of the world. At times, the voices of Palestinian specters invade the radio transmission.
 
The connection between Chile and Palestine in Radio Piedras Archives is not arbitrary, as it forms part of a specific historical reality: it is this South American country that is home to the largest Palestinian diaspora community outside the Middle East (around 500,000 people), with migratory waves going back to the mid-nineteenth century. This connection offers a clue to the political interrelations narrated in the piece: Is the global revolution described by Radio Piedras a network of territorial struggles around the world? Is there a connection, for example, between Palestine and Wallmapu, the Mapuche territory spreading across Chile and Argentina? If we pay close attention to the end of Episode 17, “Radio Chomío,” in which we hear Nekul Núñez report the liberation of 40 Mapuche political prisoners, it becomes clear that the answer is yes. Jaar’s narrative mosaic aims to destabilize progressive timelines, the binary codes of the digital and simple territorial connections.
 

The concept of the living fossil is essential to understanding Radio Piedras Archives: in this case, the fossil doesn’t belong to a past that has since been overcome, but instead has agency in the present and models future forms. This sound piece represents a hauntological path: the spectral labyrinths made possible by the living fossil survive “in between,” halfway between bodies, infrastructures and temporalities, halfway between the living and the dead. Are the disappeared also found in this “in between”? Can this “in between” explain the sinister silences that Jaar introduces into the military broadcasts by the National Radio of Chile that we hear in Episode 15, evoking the enforced disappearances by Pinochet’s military dictatorship? How do we account for these intermediary spaces?
 
The first episodes of Radio Piedras Archives began to circulate on Telegram in mid-2022, making a statement on the free, open circulation of art. Since then, some episodes have been presented in spaces such as Radio Alhara (Bethlehem, Palestine), the Centro de Extensión del Instituto Nacional (CEINA) and Galería Cima (both in Santiago, Chile). It is presented in its entirety as an installation for the first time at the Space for Sound Experimentation. This presentation is in line with another of the piece’s central messages: that of creating spaces for listening that are not organized algorithmically/lucratively and making the ear (and, more precisely, the cochlea, as described in the final episode, “Un nuevo número”) a central element in contemporary politics.

The cochlea, that spiral structure of the inner ear, transforms acoustic vibrations into nerve signals and is therefore an intermediary space: in Radio Piedras Archives, it serves as a symbol of a reality that walks the edges of history to imagine unknown and unheard futures.
 
I know where the number is, I’ve been there. The boy’s cave. The number is there, with him. In the puddle. It’s the puddle. He says that it's the world's cochlea. Billions of ancient bacteria, the most powerful source of probability in our world. And I asked him: How can a puddle be a number? And this is what he told me: This number is neither simple nor complex, neither even nor odd, neither positive nor negative. Neither irrational nor rational. Neither infinite nor finite. A number that says: I am not a number. There are people who believe it to be moon water. The number that listens. Others say that it’s the number among numbers, but I tell you that it’s the world’s cochlea—I swear to you—I have been there.

Nicolás Jaar