In this recording, you can listen to the opening concert by Ilir Bajri, presenting a sonification of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.

Ilir Bajri, an experimental jazz musician from Kosovo, opened the PRISON RADIO festival in the big prison courtyard with a sonification of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Through fragmentation, intense musicality and vocal estrangement, Foucault’s text built and dissolved constantly through different languages and voices, tones and temperatures. As PRISON x ARCHIPELAGO the concert asks how does the prison circulate beyond its walls: through which institutions, structures and forms of discipline, and where does it ultimately take shape within ourselves and our companions.

PRISON RADIO Festival

PRISON RADIO is an international, transdisciplinary sound and radio art project that rethinks both prison and radio as social, political and artistic structures. Broadcast and recorded in Prishtina from 10 to 13 September 2026, the festival featured a 72-hour radio programme, comprising approximately 30 hours of live broadcasts and 42 hours of pre-produced content. Taking the Former Prishtina Prison as a resonant site, the festival approaches the prison not only as a historical institution of confinement, but also as a metaphor for wider invisible architectures of limitation: social roles, gender norms, borders, political pressure, economic constraint, trauma, language, surveillance and silence. Through radio art, soundwalks, live broadcasts, performances, concerts, lectures, workshops, a community run, collective listening sessions and the exhibition Sound, Resisting, which extended across four prison blocks, the watchtower and the courtyards, PRISON RADIO transformed a former site of punishment into a temporary space of voice, resistance and public reflection. The festival draws on critical prison studies, the politics of listening, sound studies, the concept of the prison without walls and the carceral continuum. It understands radio as a dissident and participatory medium through which voices, art and sounds travel beyond walls, borders and dominant narratives.

Curation & programme: PRISON RADIO Collective (Alban Beqiraj, Blertë Ismajli, Alexander Vojvoda, Verena Walzl)
Organisation: STRALLI
Radio production: Lumpen Station (CH), commissioned by PRISON RADIO Festival
Live radio direction, technical production & post-production: Andrea Marioni, Lumpen Station
Partners: Lumpen Station (CH), Kolektiv Radio (KS), Molla e Kuqe (KS)
Venues: Burgu i Idealit (Former Prishtina Prison) and Hani i dy Robertëve, Prishtina
Supported by: Embassy of Switzerland in Kosovo, Austrian Embassy in Prishtina, Institut Français du Kosovo / French Embassy in Prishtina