Radio Broadcast COOP ‘The Salt of the Earth’ Episode 2

The Salt of the Earth, de Appel’s COOP study group at Dutch Art Institute, collectively explores land and water as formative resources of culture, knowledge, and resistance in a time of ongoing extraction and dispossession. Moving across critical theory, oral histories, embodied practices and sound as a commons, the COOP engages traditions as living structures of feeling that shape the present and imagine alternative futures. Fragments and reflections from the study group are shared through Radio Alhara. The second episode, key to be buried, invites you on a multi-layered stroll across cities, through a speculative story, and into a museum collection.

The episode starts with a collective reading of The Key by Anwar Hamed, from the science-fiction anthology Palestine +100: Stories from a Century after the Nakba, in which twelve Palestinian writers imagine Palestine in the year 2048. It then turns to the Palestinian Museum Collections, and what it means to experience an artwork through its description alone. Through these offerings, the episode reflects on the persistence of Palestinian culture and the ways memory and heritage continue to be preserved despite destruction. From a call to prayer in Nicosia, to a concert on an Istanbul ferry, and from improvised music from London to birds chirping in Oslo; follow the sounds, and let the walk unfold.

This episode is a collaboration with Radio Alhara, produced by Rana Kelleci, Oliver Turvey, and Asmaa Barkat in collaboration with The Salt of the Earth COOP at Dutch Art Institute, facilitated by de Appel.

Field recording of Istanbul ferry: guitar performed by Ömercan Uslu