You thought it was a radio? It's Calva Radio. It sounds like a radio. So begins the radio station named as the neighbourhood in the Eastern area of Milan. Zone 4, Calvairate. Radio Calva's project has grown slowly, in the time cutouts of the people who worked on it after work. The voices of the neighbourhood go on air, tell the stories of the area and keep up the name of the suburban area because Calvairate is not just a neighbourhood, but the heart of the people.
We had the pleasure to know who is behind this social project.
Who is behind the CalvaRadio project?
We are a bunch of subversives of the exclusive gentrification system and we have
decided to give voice to the Calvairate district. We launched the radio on Saint Valentine's Day 2020: this tells you a lot about us and the kind of optimists we are.
How and when was the project born?
The project was born from the will of a cultural association active in the territory since 2013. The project-202– thanks to social street aggregative, playful appointments for people still feeling young, Calvaoke, plant moves and free parking spaces for the use of the bicycles - found himself responding to a request that arose from the social street. It took us a year to carry out the project because we had to pay attention to permissions, domain, site uploading, naming study and various groups (which often ended up with an alcohol content that was not allowed out of Dazi di Calvairate, ed). But now we are here and we are gathering more people around us.
The logo is very interesting from a semiotic point of view. A woman looking to the
east, towards the Calvairate district. How did the idea come about?
One of the first documents about Calvairate back to 822. The document contains a
controversy involving a girl from Valtellina, called Luba, together with her husband
Domenico. The woman declared herself free from the relationship of previous servitude with the monastery of St. Ambrose, while the abbot of the monastery, Nonio, believed he should still be involved in the activity of the monastery. The court was composed, among others, by Marchadrano Odelfrit de Calvairate. That woman, Luba, who breaks the bond of servitude, is the woman of the Logo. Calvairate thus breaks the link of dependence and subordination with the neighbourhoods in the centre claiming their autonomy, as well as the example of Luba reminds us. The view to the East is a reminder of the location of the district. We still have to give a name for our little woman, maybe we will publish an open question on the website and the socials to find it. We are also waiting for your idea.
There are so many topics you deal with, how do you organize your editorial plan?
We organize it after the "real" work, at night and during the weekend. This is the reason why in August we took a little break from the double / triple work we usually do. We deserved a vacation period to recharge and then come back to work better than ever. We try to mix the hot themes of social street, our events and the streaming of new podcasts: it is not always easy, but we manage it because we are the champions of neutrality.
What is the age range of your most active audience?
We have a cross-cutting approach, but we are focused on 25 - 45 years old people, and we also want to aspire to the very young and we would reach “Anni Azzurri” (nursing home).
What are the future projects of Radio Calva?
I swear, I can’t tell anything at the moment. Trust me. As you will see from our Instagram account, we have just ended a recruitment campaign with new talents that have brought many ideas and energies: we are now organizing and combining everything together and there are a lot of project to talk about.
Every Traceur must be creative. While projecting the routes, how much can you improvise?
I improvise very little. Before leaving, I imagine myself making each movement and then I try to reproduce exactly what I imagine. We improvise on details (put 3 feet on the walls rather than two, the angle of the feet or hands ...) but very rarely on the main movements of the line. Improvisation usually leads to a loss of control.
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