“In 1962 Victor Papanek and George Seegers designed a Radio Receiver for the Third World, as they called it. This invention, with a price tag of 9 (US) cents, lacked a signal selector (it was non-directional), which means that it could hypothetically receive all the planet’s radio transmissions at the same time. This unusual feature was justified by the scarcity of radio signals and relay stations in the realm of underdevelopment. As a source of energy, the receiver used a few grams of combusted paraffin, which could be replenished after it ran out with the ignition of paper or dry cow dung. The artifact’s configuration, very different from the expected morphology of a radio, was a makeshift and provisional articulation of an empty juice can, stuffed paraffin, a fabric of copper wires as an antenna, a cheap earphone, a wire tied to a nail for grounding, and a tunnel diode. It is possible that only the irruption of noise in the artifact gave meaning to this unthinkable conjunction of materials, objects, and processes. One sentence, the opening notes of a bolero or even the labored breathing of a newscaster bore the responsibility of transforming the artifact into a radio. In semantic terms, the integrity of the Receiver for the Third World was as volatile as the signals that it received. As imprecise and prone to breaking up as the murky communications in the locations to which it was confined.

One can imagine millions of these radios—not painted gray—puffing smoke across Indonesia, Latin America, and the African grasslands. A tricontinental army of cows working together, linked their digestive systems to the already hybrid structure of the radio. Hundreds of thousands of Receivers for the Third World scattered across the shelves, tables, or corners of another hundred thousand houses, huts, and temporary settlements in colonial lands.”

—Son o no Son, directed by Ernesto Oroza, 2015.

BACK TO EXHIBITION PAGE