Seduced by sounds, Viola started collecting sound bytes of ambience and voices during her professional photographic trips. Her passion for storytelling, expressed in pictures with the reportage, is naturally transmitted through sounds in radio documentary. She has started telling some personal stories, integrated into the social context of the times, on the national Italian radio.
RADIO
RADIO PROGRAMS LIST:
- RADIO TRE RAI – TRE SOLDI: “Mio Fratello Zef”
- RADIO TRE RAI – TRE SOLDI: “I cavalli scalzi di Fahnnestock ranch”
- RADIO TRE RAI – TRE SOLDI: “Una settimana al City Plaza Hotel”
- RADIO TRE RAI – TRE SOLDI: “Tribù Tattoo – le storie dietro i tatuaggi”
- RADIO TRE RAI – TRE SOLDI: “RISALENTO, verso un nuovo paesaggio pugliese”
- RFI – SI LOIN SI PROCHE: “SALENTO, le Finistère des possibles”
RADIO TRE RAI - TRE SOLDI: "Una settimana al City Plaza Hotel"
“One week in the City Plaza Hotel”
A radio documentary by Viola Berlanda
One week in the City Plaza Hotel is a radio documentary in 5 episodes that tells of the experience of Viola at the Occupy City Plaza Hotel in Athens. After the EU-Turkey agreement, designed to stop mass immigration to Europe in May 2016, a group of migrants accompanied by volunteers occupied the well-known City Plaza Hotel in Athens. It had been vacant for several years, as its owners had gone bankrupt.
The ex-hotel has become home to some 400 refugees and migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Iran and elsewhere. It affords its guests a level of dignity that they wouldn’t find elsewhere.
City Plaza functions collectively with refugees and activists cooking, cleaning, and making decisions together.
The protagonist of the story is a 26-year-old Italian volunteer, his name is Giovanni.
For over ten months he had been dedicating his life to this unusual community system: refugees and volunteers live and work together in an autonomous hive where people have private rooms and their own bathrooms.
Viola was Giovanni’s childhood babysitter and one day she found out he was at the City Plaza and decided to track him down.
She arrived at City Plaza Hotel and started to work in the community as well.
Giovanni guided Viola through the intimate life of the hotel, introducing her to his friends and explaining to her how this fragile system works.
