Love Radio


  • Photographer
    Anoek Steketee
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Company/Studios
    Anoek Steketee
  • Date of Photograph
    2014
  • Technical Info
    Digital, Lambda print

1. Radio, Musambira, Southern province. For many Rwandans, especially on the countryside, radio is still the only access to media. 2.Listeners , Rulindo, Northern province, 9.10 pm. 3. Young listener, Rulindo, Northern province, 8.58 pm 4.Musambira, Southern province. One of the many villages in Rwanda which has experienced the fictional scenario of the radiosoap for real. 5. Fanmail, recording studio radiosoap Musekeweya, Kimihurura, Kigali. Every week, the makers of the radiosoap receive dozens of letters and emails by listeners, who reflect on the storyline and share their own experiences, often identifying with the characters. “Rutaganira, I don’t won’t to listen anymore to your wrong ideas. Stop spoiling society!” (fan from Butare).

Story

Love Radio is a transmedia documentary about the complex process
of reconciliation in post-genocide Rwanda, based around the popular radiosoap “Musekeweya” (New Dawn).

In 1994, in only hundred days, some 800,000 Tutsi and tens of thousands of moderate Hutu were murdered in what can be called one of the darkest episodes in recent history.
Virulent hate campaigns in the media were at the heart of the genocide. Radio played a crucial role during the killings. On the same frequency that in 1994 incited the murder of the Tutsi ‘inyenzi’ (cockroaches), the radio soap Musekeweya today broadcasts a message of reconciliation. Three times a week, between 8.45 pm and 9.15 pm, the show keeps the ears of hundreds of thousands of Rwandans glued to their radios.
The story line in the radiosoap Musekeweya takes place in Muhumuro and Bumanzi, two fictional villages that hate each other’s guts. Musekeweya seems to be a fairly normal soap at first, full of romances, intrigues and villains with resounding names like Rutaganira and Zaninka. The love between Shema en Batamuriza is like a Rwandan ‘Romeo and Juliet’.
But there is a major difference: the soap is supposed to do more than just entertain; it is also intended to convey to listeners how violence begins and how it can be prevented. It applies the theories of American psychologist Ervin Staub concerning the origins of group violence and genocide.
While the radio show has an idealistic premise, the documentary project also raises some questions. Can fiction get people to reconcile? Or is this positive voice merely a veneer in a country still coping with the traumas of the genocide? And what does reconciliation actually mean?

In Love Radio the complex reality emerges gradually.
The project straddles the boundary between fact and fiction. In addition to the radio programme’s fictional story line, the project shows the reality that Rwandans have to cope with through interviews with the soap opera’s
makers and listeners in the webdocumentary.
The photographs and video’s do not take a purely documentary approach. The camera is used not only to raise social issues, but also as a tool for the imagination. By playing with light and partially directing the subjects, alienating images emerge, with the surroundings as an gloomy stage set.
Love Radio is about violence and reconciliation, guilt and innocence, forgiving and being forgiven. But it is also about the power of imagination, the role of the media in society, the emergence of a collective way of thinking and about scapegoating. These are universal themes that, today, concern everyone and are more relevant than ever.
Love Radio is a collaboration between photographer/filmmaker Anoek Steketee and journalist/filmmaker Eefje Blankevoort.
Besides a show in FOAM in Amsterdam, , the project also includes a web documentary and tapstories, short stories in photography and text for
smartphones. www.loveradio_rwanda.org.


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