Gabi Schaffner
bangaloREsident@Maraa
Making Radio:
Gabi Schaffner is a sound and radio artist who plans to create a series of site-related radio works that channel locality, voice and individual perspective into poetic street performances. Parallel to this, she will pursue her sound mapping of applied botany and urban garden communities within the frame of her garden radio project Datscha Radio.
Gabi Schaffner studied German and American literature and ethnology at the Johann Goethe University in Frankfurt / Main. Since the late ‘80s, she has been an active contributor to literary journals and underground magazines. Her interest in photography led to a second degree at the Hamburg School of Fine Arts (with Johannes Bernhard Blume), from where she graduated with honours. Parallel to her studies she worked as a performer, storyteller and curator in the fields of experimental literature, music and film. Between 2002 and 2006, she maintained the interdisciplinary platform "Dada de Nada" in collaboration with activists from the Hamburg art, culture and DIY scene.
A DAAD scholarship in Iceland in 2001 gave rise to her first work with sound recordings. This was followed by publications with the Frankfurt Field Recording label "gruenrekorder" and, from 2005, by commissions for public radio stations ("Der Klang des Schnees" with Götz Naleppa, Deutschlandradio). In addition, she worked as a translator and writer for art publishers and galleries (among others, transkript, Verlag für Moderne Kunst, textem, The Green Box)
© Mathias Deutsch
Gabi Schaffner's artistic practice is determined by the methods of poetic ethnography in connection with fluxus-like mise-en-scènes and performances. Much of her work originates from her journeys.
A scholarship from the Kone Foundation in Helsinki facilitated the research for her fictitious biography about the avant-garde composer Martti Mauri. "Otto Mötö. Into the universe of Finnish motor music” won the prize "Radio play of the month" from the German Academy of Performing Arts in 2012. The same year, the internationally renowned radio project Datscha Radio was founded together with reboot.fm, Berlin’s art radio station.
Since 2015, she has been using micro-FM transmitters to create local radiospheres. "Electric Fairy Grounds" for instance, realised in Bogong, Australia in April 2017, is a multipart, collaged radio play that narrates the history of the region from different perspectives and in various locations in the terrain. It was made audible via three hidden micro-FM transmitters, and only accessible by hiking from station to station.
Gabi Schaffner also documented the Radiokunstfestival Radiorevolten 2016 in Halle in text and images. Currently, she is preparing (with Datscha Radio III) a five-day garden radio festival, which will take place in Berlin from the 25th to the 29th of August.
During the bangaloREsidency, she will work together with Maraa to create a series of site-related radio works that channel locality, voice and individual perspective into poetic street performances. The sound recordings of these performances will subsequently resurface as a poly-vocal radio installation. At a later point in time they will be incorporated in the production of a 7" single, intended for use as a DJ tool.
Parallel to this, she will pursue her sound mapping of applied botany and urban garden communities, and make them available to Maraa's radio community too.
