60 Second Radio was launched in 2015. It is now completing its 9th edition. Radio art, collage, soundscapes, radio theatre, sonic prose and poetry, sound art, creative documentary, mutant radio, sonic captures: anything is possible as long as it’s 60 seconds long. 60 Second radio has over the years shared more than 1 400 radio works produced by artists from fifty countries and working in thirty languages. It is both an international radio art competition and broadcast platform. The works produced are each year distributed to some fifty FM, Dab, Dab + and web radios in the Americas, Europe, Oceania and elsewhere, as well as in many radio and audio festivals and public events. 60 Second Radio is launched every February 13th to underline the importance of the medium as well as Unesco’s World Radio Day.
The 60 Second Radio proposition is very simple. We are committed to new ways to approach radio as a medium of transmission and to produce radioworks. We wish to offer to all radio practitioners, artists and artisans, who are at the forefront of innovation, to those who have in their hands, in the hollow of their voices and instruments, new narrative proposals, a channel to reward them, a way to rebroadcast them, to allow for a moment that is exclusively dedicated to those who use the medium to promote its artistic value. Radio art’s mission is sometimes to shake the imaginary, to guide it to the airwaves and programmed recordings. Radio art sets the stage for a new radio practice and highlights the multiple possibilities of broadcasting. It transcribes, with sounds, colours, voices, poetry, a certain multiplicity of listening proposals. It is at times and we know it, an act of faith. We, at 60 Second Radio, are from the school of inventiveness, in favour of the musicality of radio, of transcultural broadcasting. We appreciate all forms of broadcasting but dedicate this event to radio art. We are located at its narrative confluences and for the staging of sound. Radio is an artwork, a world to listen, to express ideas and invent. We are sometimes silent and impressionistic, otherwise verbal and descriptive, raw or docile, aesthetic or annoying. We take centre stage or observe it through the keyhole.
Radio art can express itself in thousands of ways (sound poetry, field, sound art, radio art, fiction, creative docs, mutant radio…), and this rendez-vous is above all a statement to confess our renewed thirst for radio.
