Retracing Steps is Majas Zećo’s Soundwalk through Prishtina. During this group listening excursion (soundwalk) the group explored the contemporary soundscape of Prishtina by retracing the steps of Blertë Ismajli’s walks to school in the 1990s, the period in which many children were segregated from public schools and were educated in an improvised system, aside from the official political regime. The group navigated narrow streets and intimate neighbourhoods while carefully listening to the sounds around them, mediated by Maja’s prompts and Verena Walzl’s writing about school journeys, which culminated in the long-form poem School Walk, which functioned as the base for the Soundwalk. The walk started in the proximity of Blerta’s home and ended at the site of the school that no longer exists, evoking memories and imaginations, past and present. In this recording, you can hear the reflection session of soundwalk participants after the end of the walk.

Maja Zećo, originally from Sarajevo and based in Scotland since 2015, is an interdisciplinary artist-researcher working across performance art, sound and moving image. Her research often involves soundwalks, listening excursions through which she engages with places of complex socio-polities. In her performance practice, critical explorations of identities, decoloniality, and Balkan futurisms have led Maja to self-burials, diving into water to recall memories, sensory-impairment experiments, and endurance practice. She presented her work across the UK and internationally, including Australia, Italy, the Netherlands and the ex-Yugoslav space.

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