In this recording, you can listen to the lecture of Labinot Kelmendi. His lecture Noise as a Mirror of Society proposes noise as a possible avenue of escape from this regime of visuality. In this context, Ismail Kadare’s neologism zhurmhuria (Noiseology) is employed as a conceptual framework that encompasses the ontological, aesthetic, and socio-political dimensions of noise. The argument unfolds through a dialogue between Jacques Attali, who interprets noise as both a mirror of and an existential condition for social transformation; Michel Serres, for whom noise constitutes the chaotic background from which material and communicative systems emerge; and Jean-Luc Nancy, in whose work listening is articulated as an onto-phenomenological mode of exposure to the vibration of being.

Labinot Kelmendi is a philosophy scholar from Prishtina. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Zagreb. For more than a decade, he has served as a teaching assistant and lecturer at the University of Prishtina, where he currently holds the academic rank of Assistant Professor. He teaches courses in Aesthetics, Contemporary Philosophy, Introduction to Phenomenology, as well as Communitas and Immunitas. Kelmendi has published scholarly articles and critical essays on visual art, music, and film. He serves as a member of the Executive Board of the Kosovo Philosophical Association and is the founder and chair of the Symposium on Philosophy, Art, and Technology, Filozofema. He is currently the vocalist of the experimental/alternative band Elektorati Intelektual.

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