Sound Art · 2026-06-29
Radio theatre and social memory: audio fiction as women's voice
The independent Spanish outlet El Salto has published an essay on how radio theatre gives women and marginalised communities a voice of their own — through concrete Spanish and Latin American projects.
El Salto is an independent Spanish outlet founded in 2017, cooperatively owned and funded by its community (micro-patronage). Its essay traces a line from Orson Welles's 1938 "War of the Worlds" broadcast and the radio adaptations of classical tragedies (Euripides' "The Trojan Women," Radio Madrid, 1949) to today's community radio.
Concrete examples: in Madrid's Territorio Doméstico, the piece "Querían brazos y llegamos personas" (2020) lets migrant domestic workers from Honduras and Ecuador tell their experiences of labour abuse and migration. The Málaga community station Color Comunitaria (formerly Onda Color) made the three-part audio drama "La revuelta de las faeneras," about the women of the 1918 Málaga bread riots (ten principal voice roles — five men and five women — with secondary parts filled by volunteer, partly amateur performers from the Palma-Palmilla district); the station's earlier piece "La desbandá" received a special mention at the 2022 Ondas Awards.
Radio theatre thus does more than entertain: it builds identity and collective memory. (Sources: El Salto; Color Comunitaria / Onda Color)
Sources: El Salto · Onda Color / Color Comunitaria
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