Radio Silence
April 15 - June 1, 2018
Mural Arts Philadelphia
Support provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the Hummingbird Foundation

Radio Silence was a participatory performance and radio project presented by Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, involving American veterans from the Iraq War and the Iraqi refugee community. Conceived with independent curator Elizabeth Thomas, the project invited local veterans and refugees to participate in a creative process to express their experiences and memories of the war, creating a space for productive dialogue. We wove together personal stories, cultural traditions, music, and found sound to create scripted passages that served as the backbone the live performance on Independence Mall, featuring professional performer and veteran Aaron Hughes and former broadcast journalists Bahjat Abdulwahed—dubbed the “Walter Cronkite of Bagdhad”—and his wife Hayfaa Ibrahem Abdulqader, among others. The performance was staged evocatively inside a recreation of Abdulwahed’s newsroom. A ten-episode radio program and podcast—distributed through a network of hundreds of community radio stations—combined recorded elements from the live performance with studio and field-based recordings, offering national audiences an opportunity to engage with an intimate, multifaceted, and sustained portrait of Iraq.