Bristol radio shows
we've toured our hometown of Bristol, asking strangers to sing a love song inside our campervan-recording studio.
We created a series of 5 radio shows that aired on Bristol community radio stations BCfm & Ujima in October & November 2021, featuring love songs collected in St Pauls, Easton, Barton Hill, Filwood and Clifton.
**NEW EPISODES APPEARING REGULARLY FROM 18th OCTOBER!**
Supported by MAYK, Quartet Community Foundation, Bristol City Council Originators Fund & Arts Council England.
Oh Europa Bristol
The Oh Europa motorhome is going to be in our hometown of Bristol over the next month. Come and find us at any of the locations below to sing us a love song or to hear love songs from all over Europe sung by ordinary people.
Keep an eye out around Bristol and if you see us on the road give us a wave!
Sat 11 Sept, 4-8pm: Theatre on the Downs
Sun 12 Sept, 12-4pm: Bristol Open Doors at Clifton Observatory
Sat 18 Sept, 12-4pm: St Marks Rd, Easton *NEW LOCATION*
Thurs 23 Sept, 2-6pm: Wellspring Settlement, Barton Hill
Sat 25 Sept, 11-3pm: St Pauls Learning Centre
Sat 2 Oct, 10-2pm: Filwood Community Centre
Beacons of Love
You might not be together with loved ones on Valentine’s Day this year. But, you can still make a date to tune into love under lockdown. You are invited to experience a digital audio artwork for your ears only: a chorus of love songs transmitted directly to GPS coordinates of your choice
On 14th February, for one day only Action Hero are bringing Oh Europa beacons directly to you, wherever you are.
This Valentine's Day, you can listen to the love songs on your daily exercise route, in your garden or even on your sofa via a location-specific audio hotspot which will broadcast voices singing with sentiments of love, heartbreak and longing. Your location, your choice!
When you sign up, you'll need to tell us the GPS coordinates of your chosen hotspot location.
Your personal audio hotspot will be activated to begin its broadcast on Valentine’s Day, and will beam love songs directly to you for one day only. On 13th February, we'll send you info on how to download the free Oh Europa app to your phone to tune into your personal audio hotspot. It's available on both apple or android mobile devices.
This Valentine’s Day, love will travel across the airwaves to provide solace, comfort and a beacon of hope in dark times.
Oh Europa in Kosova
We were due to travel to Pristina this year and collect more love songs and present RadiOh Europa as part of HAPU festival organised by Teatri ODA but the pandemic meant we couldn't travel. So instead we worked online from our home in Bristol with local artist Daniela Markaj who collected some songs on our behalf and then did a special guerilla version of RadiOh Europa in Pristina. They drove in a special van and parked up in different residential neighbourhoods and played love songs collected by Daniela but also love songs we've collected from all around Europe. It was a great experience working with Teatri ODA and Daniela and finding a way to still spread love in these difficult times to passers-by in Kosova. We can't wait to travel there in person in 2021 and meet Daniela in real life and some of the people who sang!
Read our accompanying book online
We've just made our book 'Postcards from the edge' viewable online. The book accompanies the Oh Europa project, detailing the locations of the beacons where the love songs play from with accompanying texts from us and David Williams. Have a look!
Click here -> Postcards from the Edge
Oh Europa on BBC Radio 4
Listen to this 15 minute programme that aired on BBC Radio 4 on the day of the General Election in the UK.
It includes some of the love songs we've collected that you might not have heard before and the two of us sharing some thoughts about the project, the journey, and the people we met on the way.
Worldwide press for Oh Europa
A big driving force behind the Oh Europa project has been our desire to try and collectively re-think, or complicate or even re-write certain narratives around Europe and although its on the ground, meeting people on the road and face to face where we feel this project does its work its been heartening and a welcome surprise to see it filtering into mainstream mediated narratives too.
More than we ever could have hoped for when we first set off from Bristol on a rainy day in 2018 Oh Europa has captured the imagination of lots of people all over the world. We've been on BBC World Service, (more than once!) BBC 5 live and BBC radio 3 on Late Junction and had articles in The Guardian, The Independent and Positive News in the UK but all across Europe people have heard about what we're doing and interviewed us. We've been on ZDF TV news in Germany, Good Morning Croatia TV show, and RTL in Croatia, DVHN TV in The Netherlands and Canal B in France, we've had articles published in Italy, Portugal, Spain and we've even been broadcast on a podcast for NPR in the U.S.
As a result the live streams of RadiOh Europa have been tuned into from countries including Bosnia, Finland, Macedonia, U.A.E, India, Canada, Czech Republic, Romania and many many more....
Hopefully over the long term this can only help the quieter voices and complex sentiments captured in the songs we've gathered resonate further and the feelings and emotional nuances of Europe's citizens be heard beyond the noisy one-note rhetoric that pervades European discourse right now.
RadiOh Europa
In the last couple of weeks we've been bombing around getting our new performance 'RadiOh Europa' ready for its first showing at Transform festival in Leeds, and then again at Fondation Cartier in Paris. We've now just got back from Paris, the gearbox is still not fixed (believe me we're trying!) so we drove the whole way home without first gear. The performances went well though. Thanks to anyone who came or tuned in online (over 700 people listened online!) and thanks to all the people who have sung for us in the last year, your courage and your care pours out of the work and we've done our best to foreground your voices because its the voices of those who have come forward to sing that make this idea what it is.
We're having a short rest and then we'll be back on the road (hopefully with a new gearbox!) soon and you can catch us in Salisbury, London, Hebden Bridge and Rennes in the next couple of months. RadiOh Europa will be performed in London at Greenwich and Docklands international festival next (on 23rd June). IN the mean time you can read a little article about us and our van in the guardian
See you somewhere soon!
Transform festival Leeds April 2019
In 2019 we're presenting a new collection of works that span a continent, re-imagining the ways we think about Europe. We're returning to Leeds where our journey began to present the full Oh Europa experience, commissioned for Transform Festival 2019
We'll also be in Leeds in our van collecting more love songs so keep an eye out for us and add your voice to our collection. More info here!
home!
So we made it! 31598km later and we're back in Bristol! We're currently trying to re-acclimatise to living in a house and not moving everyday. Its going to take some time we think, everything feels strange. The fact that water continuously flows out of taps, the fact that there's more than one room to spend time in. The fact that we're not outside most of the time, all feels weird. We're sad to leave life on the road behind, its been such an enormous pleasure and we've felt so lucky to have been able to make it all happen and the project exceeded our most optimistic expectations.
We travelled to 32 countries in total, we recorded over 700 people singing love songs in French, Spanish, German, Czech, Slovakian, Russian, Romany, Finnish, Hungarian, Swiss-German, Italian, Thai, Vietnamese, Arabic, Chinese, Filipino, Greek, Swedish, Romanian, Ukranian, Portugese and more! We met so many people and felt so overwhelmed by the generosity and kindness of the people we met, and the willingness to sing for us. We were worried that when we returned to the UK the weight of the Brexit situation and the atmosphere of the country would feel difficult or a shock to the system. We imagined ourselves pulling up in the drizzle in Bristol and facing cynicism or indifference to what we were doing but instead, we pulled up in the bright Autumn sunshine and people were full of love and hope and enthusiasm and loads and loads of people sang for us and we remembered that the people of Bristol, and the people of the UK are warm, full of humour, creative, talented, brilliant people. It was a great ending to the project.
The next night our van was parked outside our house and someone grafittied it. Just a kid probably. It was a small tag but it felt upsetting to have the van de-faced. We managed to get it off but the next day, parking in a different spot to try and avoid it happening again a man came out is house and grumbled about 'people in vans' and said he had is 'eye on us'. Both small incidents but a reminder that its a challenge to continue to respond with love and that people in all their complexity will not always have love to give.
But we will continue. This 6 month journey is over but we will continue to travel and to invite the people we meet to sing. The songs we have collected will continue to broadcast all day everyday on the 42 beacons we have placed across the continent, and we will continue to add more beacons so more people can travel to hear the songs, and perhaps find a space within their lives to listen to the voices of other people in Europe and hear all the loneliness, the heartbreak, the loss, the longing, the regret, the hope, the warmth and the love that they are feeling.
We'll also be presenting a performance and exhibition from early next year in various places across the UK and Europe so keep an eye out for that, and in the meantime find a beacon near you and listen to the songs, or watch the videos we made from the trip, or listen to a podcast or read this lovely article in the Independent about our journey, or just think of a love song you know and sing it to yourself or to someone you love.
Over and out (until next year)
James and Gemma