Edizione: 2019

Listening Kids

SEMINAR With talks by Gianfranco Bandini (UNIFI), Radioimmaginaria, Tjeerd van den Elsen (Radiorakkers), Sébastien Schimtz and Florent Barat (Le Collectif WOW!), Ana Gonzalez (Terrestrials – Radiolab) and a masterclass by Sara de Monchy Lucia Festival will open with a seminar dedicated to audio storytelling for children. Bambini all’ascolto / Listening Kids welcomes researchers, podcasters and […]

Valerio Daniel Simoni – Diario di viaggio

In June 2010 Valerio Daniel De Simoni planned something extraordinary: to cross Europe and Africa and find his way back to Australia to beat the world record for a quad travel, to raise funds with Oxfam and help two African villages. Unfortunately he never came back…

Giuseppe Salvemini – Con il fuoco nelle vene

Giuseppe Salvemini Con il fuoco nelle vene Giuseppe Salvemini died on October 13, 1918. He was 21 years old. He had been back from the Great War for a year due to asphyxiant gas poisoning. Two years earlier he had abandoned his studies to attend the Military Academy in Modena and finally enroll as a […]

1. YASS! Masterclass Program 22

Radio Papesse and Lucia support creative authorship, new voices and innovative productions that play with and around the limits and rules of radio production and podcasting. 

YASS! You are so sound is a training and exchange program for producers, audio makers and sound artists – emerging or otherwise – who have a proven track record in audio storytelling; it provides them with skills and resources to advance their projects and careers.

This series allows participants to discover and listen to peers from different latitudes, traditions, languages… and discover methodologies and insights for sound creation along with them. Each masterclass will provide them with tools and behind-the-scenes perspectives to discover how others work and learn from good practices. 

The 2022 edition of YASS! features Helen Zaltzman, Mitra Kaboli, Felix Blume, Sara de Monchy and Nanna Hauge Kristensen.

2. (Almost) everything you want to know about YASS!

How do I register for the masterclasses?

TO JOIN, PLEASE FILL IN THE ONLINE FORM

Up to 30 people may take part in each masterclass. If the seats in the masterclass(es) you have decided to attend are sold out, please send an email to yass@radiopapesse.org with the following subject line: Waiting list + Masterclass name.

How much do the masterclasses cost?

We would have liked to keep the series free of charge, but we do ask you for a small contribution to cover organizational costs: €5 per lesson, €25 for the entire programme. The value of what we’ll share is much greater, we know that as much as you do. We always strive to ensure that our content and activities are accessible, also economically, to the community we share our profession and passion for audio with. But we also have to think about the sustainability of what we do – Radio Papesse is a non-profit cultural association – and for free is never cost-free for us… However YASS! is free of charge for all students who can prove they are enrolled in the current year.

What are the requirements for participation?

YASS! is a programme designed for authors, artists and audio producers, but also for those who want to fine tune their own voice and improve their tools and techniques.

Participants in the masterclasses must have at least a basic knowledge of audio production. Participants must have a good knowledge of English.

Where do the masterclasses take place?

YASS! masterclasses take place online (Felix Blume, Mitra Kaboli e Helen Zaltzman) while Sara de Monchy’s e Nanna Hauge Kirstensen’s classes will be both virtual and live in Florence.

All participants will be sent detailed instructions and a private link to access the streaming.

If you can’t find what you’re looking for here, write to yass@radiopapesse.org

3. 2022 Digital Masterclass / Masterclasses

Helen Zaltzman

Boring Interesting
November 10th, 6pm

Not all audio stories are personal; not all are emotional. The Allusionist is a show about language, so the stories belong to hundreds, millions, even billions of people, some currently alive, some of whom may have been dead for 2,000 years. The purpose of the show is not to showcase an individual’s lived experience, but to make the depersonalised relevant to whichever person is listening, whether it is as devastating as the oppression of people via language, or as dry and dispassionate as indefinite hyperbolic numerals. How do you carve a narrative from such a gigantic, idiosyncratic, sprawling mess as language, then make something so complex into an easily digestible 25-minute entertainment podcast for all ages and knowledge backgrounds?

Helen Zaltzman is a multiple award-winning podcast host and producer. She is entirely self-taught and works mostly alone, usually from bed. Her linguistics entertainment podcast The Allusionist covers topics ranging from oppressed language and queer history, to protest cakes and weird facts about falcons. The live theatrical spin-off has appeared on stages around the world. Answer Me This, the comedy show she began with Olly Mann in 2007, was one of Britain’s longest-running and most successful independent podcasts, ran for 400 episodes and nearly 15 years. She founded the Podcasters’ Support Group on Facebook to provide a home for all podcasters’ most tedious questions about microphones and hosting sites.

Mitra Kaboli

Behind the scenes of Welcome to Provincetown
November 17th, 6pm

In 2021, when Ben Riskin – one of the founders of Room Tone – asked her to work on a series about Provincetown, Mitra Kaboli did not expect to move there for the whole summer. Too good to be true. And yet… PTown – the Massachusetts beach town best known for its popularity in the LGBTQ+ community – welcomed her. 

Welcome to Provincetown is a series somewhere between the immediacy of a reality show and the multifaceted depth of the best documentaries: it is an extraordinary example of how a distinctive auteur like Mitra Kaboli can put herself at the service of other people’s stories in order to sketch a portrait that is ultimately and exquisitely collective. 

In this behind-the-scenes review of Welcome to Provincetown, Mitra Kaboli will talk about the challenges and choices that have accompanied her over this past year of work. Mitra Kaboli is an award-winning audio documentarian and multimedia artist who has been working professionally in radio and podcasting since 2012. Her work has been featured on The Heart, NPR’s Latino USAMaking Contact, ESPN’s 30 for 30 and Audible Productions. Currently, she is the host of the critically acclaimed podcast Welcome to Provincetown.

Felix Blume

Listening to the other(s)
December 1st, 6pmm

More than sound, listening is the central point of Felix Blume’s work: listening as a way to relate to others, to meet and learn from the other(s). Revisiting previous projects, such as his audio piece Los gritos de México – which earned him the “Pierre Schaeffer” Prize at Phonurgia Nova Festival 2015 – and the 2019 film Curupira, creature of the woods, he will delve into the collaborative approach of his practice and talk about his relationship with listening. 

Félix Blume is a sound artist and sound engineer. He currently works and lives between Mexico, Brazil and France. He uses sound as a basic material in sound pieces, videos, actions and installations. His process is often collaborative, working with communities, using public space as the context within which he explores and presents his works. He is interested in myths and their contemporary interpretation, in human dialogues both with inhabited natural and urban contexts, in what voices can tell beyond words

His sound pieces have been broadcast on radios all over the world, and he has participated in international festivals and exhibitions including Rotterdam IFF (2021), Berlinale (2019), Thailand Biennale (2018), CENTEX Chile (2017), CTM Berlin (2017), Fonoteca Nacional Mexico (2016), LOOP Barcelona (2015) and Tsonami Arte Sonoro Chile (2015, 2018). 

Sara de Monchy

How to make exiting youth audio
December 9th, 5.45pm

Sara de Monchy is a theater and podcast director. She graduated from the Royal Theatre Academy in Maastricht, and has several successful theater productions to her credit. Her love for fantasy, audio and theater comes together in her well acclaimed podcast Sara’s Mysteries, in which she solves mysteries with kids: who is the owner of that creepy little shed, where is my dog who suddenly disappeared, and what is hidden in the basement of my school? The podcast was nominated for different prizes and is a binge worthy ritual for many Dutch families!

In this interactive workshop, with the help of raw material, failed and successful scenes, Sara retraces the steps she took as she created Sara’s Mysteries. We discover the importance of ‘excitement’ for youth, how to get into the head of elusive 11-year-olds and how to make them talk freely about their biggest questions. We discover where you really can’t get away with making audio for children, and why ‘the car’ is a returning location in Sara’s Mysteries.
After this workshop, you will have a fresh ground for creating your own podcast for children!

Nanna Hauge Kristensen

Loss, Rain and Listening as an act of intimacy.
December 10th, 2.30pm

A central aspect of audio making is listening. For Nanna Hauge Kristensen, listening entails a bodily attentiveness – an attunement to the Other, it creates a space where openness and exchanges can unfold. Her audio pieces often revolve around loss and beginnings, and her work moves across anthropology, documentarism and art. In her sonic explorations of lifeworlds and atmospheres, she seeks to cultivate a deep ethnographic listening: “What attracts me – Nanna says – both as an audio maker and a listener, are the intimate, sensory, and open-ended representations of the complex world that we share.” For this masterclass, she will invite us into her practice, sharing examples of her work, and offering some reflections on listening as a creative method. 

Nanna Hauge Kristensen is an audio producer and anthropologist based in Copenhagen. Her work has won several international awards, including the Third Coast International Audio Award for Best Foreign Documentary.

YASS! is organized thanks to the support of Regione Toscana Toscanaincontempornaea 2022, Comune di Firenze, Città Metropolitana di Firenze, Fondazione CR Firenze, Kingdom of the Netherland, Unicoop Firenze.

1. YASS! Mentorship Program & Production Grant 2021

You Are So Sound! is a five month one-to-one mentorship program for emerging or experienced authors and audio artists of any age.

Do you have an idea for an audio piece or a work-in-progress you need support for? We are looking for you! If you are willing to learn and share your creative process with an experienced mentor, you are in the right place! 

Three audio makers will be selected to work with the YASS! 2021 mentors Katharina Smets, Rikke Houd, Alessandra Eramo and Tempo Reale, between February and June 2021, in order to complete their audio piece before the summer. 

Each mentee will be paired with one mentor whom we think will enhance their work. Our aim is to create a space for mutual creative exchange that supports the individual process of the author.

Mentors will respect who you are and what you do but they will also positively challenge you to go beyond your production comfort zone and this means to be fully aware of what the audio materials allow you to do and to which extent you can push their boundaries. That’s also why Tempo Reale will mentor you all, through sound composition and audio design.

It’s a big step into the unknown to be open to such a professional and personal exchange but try to imagine the rich and surprising dialogue you might be engaged in!

2. What do the mentees get from YASS!?

• 40 hours of the mentorship program
To be scheduled according to the needs of both mentees and mentors
• Co-production grant: €1.200/each
• Four digital masterclasses with international audio makers
The masterclasses will be organized in collaboration with Oorzaken Festival and Atelier de création sonore et radiophonique 
• Support to the international circulation of the final productions
• Presentation of the productions at LUCIA Festival 2021

The Authors will keep the rights to their works, but will grant Radio Papesse and LUCIA Festival the permission/right to make them accessible online – on radiopapesse.org and luciafestival.org – in the frame of related events (such as educational programs, listening sessions…) and to use them for non-commercial uses in general.

3. How to participate

In order to participate, you are required to fill in the participation form and to include in it the address of a shared folder (Dropbox, GDrive, One Drive…) with:

• your portfolio
  Put all the info into a document (in English), you may include links for us to listen to
• an audio self portrait (max 2 minutes)
  How would you describe yourself in sound?
• project synopsis
  What is your project about? What is it that you’d like to work on during the Mentorship Program?
• if you’re already in the middle of your production, please include an excerpt of your draft audio (max 5 minutes)
• 15 € entry fee payment receipt [if you’re a student, you don’t have to pay it]
[via Paypal or wire transfer to
Unicredit Banca
  Agenzia: Firenze Nazario Sauro
  IBAN: IT 06 J 02008 02836 000401118520
  BIC SWIFT: UNCRITM1F13]

All these infos will help us not only to select the mentees but also to pair you with the mentors. The more we know about you, the better to foresee significant collaborations and enriching turning points in your productions. 

DEADLINE: January 17th 2021 @ 11PM (CET)

**We are all from diverse latitudes and we welcome every language, but we do ask you to keep our communication in English. 

Disclaimer: review of applicants will begin in mid-January, and all applicants will be notified by early February regarding the selection. 

3. The mentors

Alessandra Eramo

Alessandra Eramo is a sound artist and vocalist based in Berlin. She works with performance and installation, text-sound composition, video and drawing, exploring latent acoustic territories of the human voice and noise as socio-political matter.

Combining visual art and contemporary music, she develops artistic projects and live-performances that address questions of the body, memory and identity, often adopting participatory actions, field recording, site-specific modes, and experimental approaches to composition. Central to her practice is extending the voice in all its forms and implications in sonic and visual contexts.

She has exhibited and performed widely at festivals, museums, galleries and institutions such as: SAVVY Contemporary Berlin, Deutschlandfunk Kultur Klangkunst, Liminaria/Manifesta12 Palermo, Tempo Reale Festival Firenze, 6th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, Transmediale Berlin, Heroines of Sound Festival Berlin, Museum FLUXUS+ Potsdam, Roulette New York, Padiglione Italia nel Mondo/54th Venice Biennale.

Her radiophonic piece Tanz Sediment (2020) was commissioned and broadcast by Deutschlandfunk Kultur.

Rikke Houd

Rikke Houd is an independent Danish radio maker working in the field of crafted audio storytelling and documentary art. She came into radio from writing, drawn to it by listening to features from the Danish Montage Group (a department at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation where the genre of radiomontage was developed since the 1930´s). These documentary radio pieces were like novels – literary works in sound. They were cinematographic, poetic, layered, rhythmic.

​After completing an MA in Radio at Goldsmiths College in 1998, she worked for the Montage Group and also its experimental off-spring Ultralyd and have worked with sound and storytelling since – in radio and podcast, theatre, exhibition, location/site specific work and in collaboration with other artforms and fields. She also coaches and teaches workshops which focus on documentary storytelling and radiophonic awareness.

As an audio storyteller, she is occupied with what happens in the meeting between the authentic material – voices, sounds, moments – and the creative shaping of the story, the fluidity of sound and the radiophonic space. How do we find our own voice as storytellers and how do we utilize the uniqueness of the sound medium?

Katharina Smets

Katharina Smets is a radio producer, performer and scholar based in Antwerp. She molds documentary materials into live performances, sound guides and radio productions.

With her transmedia collective The Space Between she explores the combinations of sound and live music, video and spoken word. Fascinated by memories and archives, her collaborations with other artists and musicians invariably start from a shared need to give voice to vulnerable or forgotten stories.

Currently working on a PhD in the arts, Katharina teaches audio storytelling at the Royal Conservatoire in Antwerp. She is a proud co-founder of MIRP, the Meeting of Independent Radio Producers.


Katharina produced work for theatre, musical ensembles and broadcast such as: STUK Leuven, muziektheater LOD & Vooruit Gent, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam, BBC World Service, VRT in Belgium and VPRO in the Netherlands. She is currently working on an artistic podcast in collaboration with the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, full of stories and music.

Tempo Reale

Founded by Luciano Berio in Florence in 1987, Tempo Reale is now one of the main European reference points for research, production and educational activities in the field of new musical technologies and electronic music.

Its main subjects of research reflect the polyhedral attitude of Tempo Reale towards music: the conception of great musical events, the study of real time sound processing and of the interaction between sound and space, the synergy between creativity, scientific competence, performative and educational rigour.

2. Who’s been selected? Mentees 2021

Between December 2020 and January 2021 we received over 100 submissions to the YASS! mentorship programme.
It has been an overwhelming answer both from acknowledged artists and new authors who have answered to our call from all over Europe and the Mediterranean with a mosaic of local and universal features, timeless tales and urgent stories arising from our interesting times, individual and collective concerns and dreams.

​To choose three projects only was a difficult feat, it was a work of subtraction, sometimes a bitter one, but we are happy to award the YASS! Mentorship to Jasmina Al-Qaisi, Kate Donovan e Studiolanda (Giorgia Cadeddu + Vittoria Soddu) and we are glad they will count on the guidance of Alessandra Eramo, Katharina Smets, Rikke Houd and Tempo Reale.

These three audio makers – all coming from very diverse backgrounds and experiences – have presented three projects that in terms of subject, intent or language respond to our request for narrative experimentation. Three poetically political projects – even though they are not openly so – that tell stories of solidarity care and collaboration.

We do always learn a lot from juries, and so we want to thank the mentors for being able to listen and see beyond our perspectives, and above all we thank all the participants who dedicated their time to YASS! We discovered widespread, vital communities and unexpected scenes of audio makers, young producers, exciting artists and stories worth telling.

We’re sure we’ll meet again, thank you all! 

Radio Papesse (Ilaria Gadenz & Carola Haupt)