we dreamt of utopia and we woke up screaming

Against the backdrop of the Cold War’s bi-polar tensions during the 1960s and 1970s, militants from all the continents convened in Algiers and witnessed a forging of a ‘third way’, other possible futures. The Algerian capital hosted everyone from national liberation movements, political exiles, rebels and disillusioned Westerners. Drawing on the liberation movements’ broadcasts aired by the Algerian national broadcasting company (RTA), the polyglot and polyphonic productions echo Yasmina Reggad’s journey through the worlds of ideas and ideals of that transformative period.

Episode 1. La radio des images qui s’écoutent is a performance inspired by the radio and documentary theatre genres. Spanning across all continents and several languages, a diverse corpus of both audio-visual and documentary archive elements and contemporary documents intertwine with testimonies by key actors and militant voices of the 1960s and 1970s. The performance provokes an encounter between voices of the past, Frantz Fanon, Houari Boumediene, Sam Nujoma, María Acerina, Elaine Mokhtefi, Antonio Cubillo, Vera Sílvia Araújo de Magalhães, Manuel Alegre or Yasser Arafat, and the voices of the present: a solidarity choir composed of today’s activists. Through the unfolding of the carefully crafted acoustic and dramatised script, the audience is led into an active form of listening constantly brought back to present and current events by the voice of the main commentator, Yasmina Reggad.

Episode 2. From Dreamers to Freedom Fighters to Terrorists is a performative installation that presents different facets of the armed struggle adopted by liberation movements in the 70s, an era characterized by acts of sabotage, bombings, kidnappings and hijackings. The work questions the way these acts are perceived by the historical parties involved at the time they occur, and by the contemporary audience in the present days. In this episode, the audience is invited to activate the installation by becoming the radio commentators of a daily live broadcast. By reading a projected script mounted like a 70s militant movies, the audience can re-enact and experience different modalities of political engagement and commitment to solidarity.

With the series Listening Session, Yasmina Reggad extends an invitation to a scholar to dive together into the sound archive and documents gathered during the artist’ long-term research we dreamt of utopia and we woke up screaming. Together they produce and perform live a new broadcast both for the ears and the eyes of the audience of listeners. Each Listening Session is amplified through a collaboration with an online militant radio and a live broadcast in order to the production of alternative archive and archival material that interrogate our shared history.