In this recording, you can listen to the Elsa Demo’s radio essay From the Silence of Words.

For PRISON RADIO Elsa Demo opened her archives and has contributed in various ways. In her Live Radio Essay From the Silence of Words she raised the question, if under high repression „free literature“ is even possible: „It is true that, under the dictatorship, Albania lived for 45 years with a model of cultural hegemony, but this does not mean that free literature was not created. It emerged in silence as a counterculture, as a form of resistance among certain authors who endured internment, political imprisonment, forced-labor camps, and, in some cases, even psychiatric institutions. Along with the authors themselves, vivid texts have reached our own time from those places; others were composed and preserved in memory within prison walls, in isolation, only to be committed to writing in a free Albania. In doing so, they restored to the Albanian cultural world some of the universal human values that the communist paradise had banished from its garden.“

Elsa Demo has been an independent Albanian journalist covering arts and culture since 2000. Together with scholar Ardian Klosi, she co-edited the anthologies Albania Remembers, 1944-1991 and Albania Tells, 1991-2010. She is the author of At the Theatre (critical writings, essays, and polemics), as well as several plays: Ash Green on Black, presented at the Dramatikerinnenfestival, Graz, The Wind Knows My Body, winner of Eurodram 2026-Albania, The Man Who Felt Everything, inspired by the folktales of Father Donat Kurti, which she also directed for the stage; and, most recently, Salambo Reads the Newspaper. Elsa lives in Tirana.

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