2024 ~ Meditations#13.2 ~ Giulia Crispiani

DAI invited guest writers Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa, Harun Morrison, and Giulia Crispiani to meditate on specific parts of COOP SUMMIT 2024 which took place in Essaouira in Morocco on September 5, 6, 7, 2025. Five COOP study groups forged their collaborative research into an assemblage of public happenings. 

Giulia Crispiani recorded what she saw and heard while attending to PRU-DONCE: Cinema on the Radio by COOP study group Curating Positions: Stream of consciousness: between collective filmmaking and anarchist thought.

COOP study group Curating Positions: Stream of consciousness: between collective filmmaking and anarchist thought presents PRU-DONCE: Cinema on the Radio on September 5, 20:30 at Dar Souiri – Association Essaouira Mogador.

We come in and sit around the stage, we are instructed not to sit on the blankets laying on the floor—on stage. There is some noise as a sonic background, some people are stitching, kneeling down, some table lamps are scattered around, and several cushions. Radio frequencies are activating the theremin in the middle of the room, and the light also changes frequency accordingly (lightning-like) and a person stands up and breathes—

Thoughts on anarchy borders property and land—
We’re not filmmakers but we use cinema as a tool.
A collaborative space
where many voices
can come together.

Colonial split 
at the border between

Cinema reveals its limitations
we’re forced to remain where we are,
writing and voice.
Intention is to approach sound images.
Materiality of sound—sound images.
A dark cinema hall, 
when everything is over.

A radio receiver to make us aware
of the sonic space around us.
Radio is our tool
to receive signals
from the other side
without moving. 
Connection to all places (we have been and we cannot return to)—

Everyone moves onto the carpet, the reader looks around and waits and announces the reading Returning to Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani. The reader reads the abstract, while some people are still stitching, then sits down. Upstairs another table light turns on, between two readers sitting on two chairs, we look at them from beneath. Down here hands continue to stitch. Their voices descend upon us, with Said and Safiyah. Then the light goes off upstairs, and the reader stands up and goes towards the microphone again and reads.

What is home?
Homeland is where, 
none of this 
can happen.

Can we still rescue the idea of
shelter and connection to landscape. 
Home is what, 
fills the space.
A temporary sensation of touching
something soft.
Even a pillow case can become
an anchor: a fabric of different layers.

Radio as a space (that)
tends to resist borders.
Listen and take a rest—
Sonic offering— 
Stitch the landscape of fabrics,
Lists, manifestos, instructions— 
Listen.

As the reader sits down a radio signal goes on, from radio station to radio station, there’s a certain sonic intensity, it feels like we are all home watching tv, when someone is zapping—watching each other. There are two people at the center of the stage manoeuvring the radio. Then a person stands up with an embroidered apron and goes in front of the mic, sings after music—The room is my body. After the song, the reader stands up again.

Where are we now?
Shape of the room
designed by a French architect as a domestic house.

The light is changing frequency again.

Stitching time
trying to catch frequencies
traveling time to places we visited 
Radio to return to memory—

Again the attention moves upstairs to the reading of Returning to Haifa—I am looking for the real Palestine that’s more than memories (…) For Khalid the homeland is the future.

Then the radio turns on again, and light disturbances follow along.

Archive of recordings 
streaming consciousness 
Radio Curating Positions—
Channel Kristal Radio.

Stitching goes on.

This is where words tend to die.
What is a homeland?
border violence, pushbacks
acab acab acab
break by break, wall by wall
let the fortress Europe fall

The reader stands up and reaches the microphone again.

Not to lift the radio silence
receive new information.

Now homes have become property.

Again the person with the embroidered apron stands up to sing—Growing up means coming up to your senses and taking responsibility (…) Anarchic delirium (…) Lack of resources.

[Radio—
Returning to Haifa
Radio
Memories of the night 
Radio
Reading letters dreams
Electromagnetic waves.
Please wear it lightly
—I can finally see the stars now.]

How do we roam across borders without repeating existing inequalities? 
How to challenge and stretch the boundaries?

[reads]

How can collectives house silence? 
How do we embody our words?

[sings]

These boundaries and borders,
Borders and boundaries.

About the author: Giulia Crispiani

Read more on the 2023-2024 COOP study group ~ Curating Positions: Stream of consciousness: between collective filmmaking and anarchist thought

Read more on PRU-DONCE: Cinema on the Radio and on COOP SUMMIT 2024 in Essaouira