Silainiai Radio (2021)

Silainiai Radio was a community radio project made for and in collaboration with the local people living in the Silainiai district, Kaunas, Palanga Street Radio and the Silainiai Project during winter 2021. I worked closely with curator Evelina Šimkutė and radio producer Julija Lečaitė to record, document and stitch together a five-part radio series that brought together fragments of Silainiai’s history and the voices of locals through excursions, workshops and personal recordings that aimed to capture its spirit.

On the 3rd December 2021, the series was broadcast live as a day-long programme on the internet waves of Palanga Street Radio. In Silainiai, the opening show ‘Silainiai Stroll’ was also played back into the heart of the district through a sound-installation located by the Versmė sculpture (nicknamed by locals as Dramblis) by Virginija Babusyte-Venckuniene, whose voice resounded back against the concrete. Later in the afternoon, the broadcast continued in the Kaunas Vincas Kudirka Public Library that had acted as a place for community cooking, meeting and sharing throughout the project.

An article was published about the project by Julija Selezniova available here.

Thanks to all the locals who shared their stories and participated, to the Lithuanian Council for Culture for their support, the Kaunas Vincas Kudirka Public Library for hosting us and Urtė Grigaliūnaitė for her project management.

This project is recorded in Lithuanian and English.