Plotform

Dear Harbor Radio

is a nomadic bike-powered interspecies love letter writing and recording studio debuting in New Bedford in July through November 2019.

Would you like to contribute?

Please do! Write a letter to your beloved nonhuman creature, object, natural element, place. Email it to us at janemarsching@gmail.com and we will set up a time to call you and record you reading your letter. Then we will add it to our growing radio broadcast.

Listen to a digital broadcast of the full radio show:

See a video of the bike cart biking the pirate radio station around the New Bedford & Boston harbors

About the project:
Here we are in the Anthropocene, confronting a changing climate and radically and speedily changing global ecological system. Climate weirding, and human and non-human losses is ever more in the public consciousness. It’s a staggering narrative of loss defined by threatening and breaking strands of the web of life. One can imagine these strands floating through the air, seeking re-connection, but missing it in the chaotic climate disruption.
A newly hatched pollinator seeking harbor in the flowering tree that bloomed at the wrong time, now resting on a bare branch.
A migrating whale lost from her pod, her navigation confused by sonar noise, beached on a far shore.
A maple sugaring outfit stymied by not enough cold at all the wrong times, concerned about the sap flows.
A fishery pulling nets up empty, despite soaring demand.

It’s a super sad, true love story.

In this pirate radio transmission, our goal is to use the love letter format to build a vocabulary of care and mutual connection that buoy the ecological relationship repair work that is already happening in the New Bedford community as well as seed, support, and nourish new repair and resilience actions. You’ll hear love expressed in a myriad of forms: letters, observations, recordings, songs, conversations–a series of calls of love from humans to non-humans a back again.

Dear Harbor Radio is part of the art exhibition Local Ecologies, which also includes contemporary, place-based art practices that bring our ecologies and land use histories into new focus. It is commissioned by the Visiting Artists Program of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at UMass Dartmouth, under the curatorial vision of Rebecca Uchill. Local Ecologies, the exhibition, opens at UMass Boston on September 26, 2019, and will be at UMass Dartmouth opening on November 14th. It will travel to UMass Lowell beginning on January 21, 2020.

Appearances:

6/29/19 10-1 outside the New Bedford Whaling Museum
7/11/19 5-8 AHA night, Outside the University Art Gallery, CVPA Starr Store Building, 715 Purchase Street • New Bedford
8/11 11-2 Allens Pond Duck Derby, Allens Pond Wildlife Sanctuary
9/16 5-8 Local Ecologies, exhibition opening, University Hall Gallery, UMass Boston
9/28 Harbor Boat Letter Writing Journey, New Bedford Harbor
10/3 Writing Workshop with UMass Dartmouth students
10/23 Letter Writing event with Creative Writing for the Environment students at UMass Boston
11/14 Local Ecologies, exhibition opening, University Art Gallery, Star Store Campus, UMass Dartmouth
11/18 12-2, Writing Workshop with UMass Dartmouth Arts Ambassador Gina Pantalone
12/4 12-2, Writing Workshop with UMass Dartmouth Arts Ambassador Gina Pantalone
1/20 Local Ecologies, exhibition, UMass Lowell