UnionDocs is thrilled to host RADIO EN DIRECT in January 2020, a series of listening events featuring stories from the French-speaking diaspora. We’re delighted to host the award-winning audio documentary Un Temps de Cochon /  Pig’s Weather from artist Benoit Bories who explores five narratives of exile and refuge in an immersive surround sound audio documentary.

Called “a very tight and subtle composition… Benoit Bories proceeds like an archaeologist, literally as well as figuratively, gradually revealing with great modesty, without urgency, the bruises of exile, sections of memories that had hitherto remained in the shadows. Documentary, play or radio work? “Un temps de cochon” are voices, resonances, sounds of the present, snippets of the past, refrains that remain. To tell as closely as possible the resurgence of memory, the polyphony of testimonies.”

This piece will be introduced by Bories and followed by a conversation led by producer and UNDO Advisor Lu Olkowski.

This event is a part of a series organized with Brooklyn Falls for France, a cultural season organized by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and FACE Foundation in partnership with Brooklyn venues.

RADIO EN DIRECT will present a series of events centered around audio documentaries—told in French with English subtitles run on the screen— with producers present to speak to the intricacies of the craft and story being told. We are bringing together a mix of local NYC based artists with producers from around the world whose work represents the diverse and widespread French-speaking community. This series will allow listeners to come together to understand how we can see audio as a global medium that works across language, and reflect the nuanced intimate and universal power of sound, voice, and listening in capturing and communicating the human experience.

Produced by documentarian Benoit Bories, Pig’s Weather captures the harrowing experience of refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War. In the midst of the “Retirada,” the exodus of Spanish and Catalan Republican refugees from Spain, Mercedes, Floréal, and Joaquim cross the Franco-Spanish border to avoid the advancement of General Franco’s Nationalist troops. Once in France, Joaquim is transported to the Septfonds internment camp and faces an agonizing fate. At risk today of becoming an industrial pork processing facility, Septfonds serves as a distressing symbol of war and suffering that Spanish exiles and their descendants continue to carry in their memories.

Benoit Bories is a documentarist and sound creator. He produces audio documentaries for France Culture, Arte Radio, Radio France International, RTBF and ABC Radio. He also works sound creations in the field of the live performance and trans-media productions (web-documentary, installations).

Lu Olkowski is a regular contributor to WNYC’s Studio360. Lu has also produced stories for All Things Considered, Day to Day, Radio Lab, This American Life, and Weekend America. Her radio work has been honored by the American Women in Radio & Television, the international competition New York Festivals, the literary magazine The Missouri Review and the Third Coast International Audio Festival. Her profile of documentary director Zana Briski won a Gracie Award in 2006.

Un temps de cochon/ Pig’s weather », a documentary concert in immersive sound 8.1. A “Le Labo Espace2-RTS” (Swiss and Radio Television) production 2019 supported by Gulliver fund (RTS, RTBF, SCAM, SACD France and Belgium), La Région Occitanie-Pyrénées-Méditerrannée and the musical creation studio Eole.