Radio Utopistan

The Roots of Everything is an event series Radio Utopistan is hosting right now together with the Club of Engineers and Friends in and with Spore in Berlin. It is about utopias and resistance in a rather dystopian world and time. We learn from the cloud forest of Intag in Ecuador and from other territories around the world, like from Bangladesh, from Palestine, from Brandenburg and Berlin herself....

Das Audio- und Textarchiv wurde in den vergangenen zwei Monaten von der Tatkraft-Redaktion von Radio Utopistan zusammen gestellt und professionell eingesprochen. Von Menschen für Menschen. Rund 40 Tatkräftige aus ganz Deutschland waren bisher daran beteiligt. Ehrenamtlich. Wir haben Stimmen aus Palästina, Deutschland und Israel gesammelt. Aus der UN, der Wissenschaft und der palästinensischen Dias...

Today in German, heute auf Deutsch. Es geht um Kaffee und damit um alles. We talk about coffee and therefore about everything. This episode is in German because the coffee man I talk to prefers German and Germany consumes A LOT of coffee. Deutschland ist nach den USA der zweitgrößte Rohkaffee-Importeur der Welt. 1,25 Millionen Tonnen importieren wir im Jahr, 165 Liter trinken wir pro Kopf im Schni...

“The first colony was not territory. It was our way to see the world.” I shared parts of this poem already with you in the community. Now you have it in sounds and voice in this episode. And you also get excerpts of an interview I did with Cenaida Guachagmira, the strongest woman of the Intag valley in Northern Ecuador. She is also the woman of a previous post in the community: Looking nature in t...

The topic of today is one of the core reasons why I question my country and my profession. We'll talk about a free Palestine. My guest is a farmer from the illegally occupied West bank. We try talking about Palestine in the most constructive way possible in such a dystopian scenario: we try to be human and honest and graceful while people are getting killed in horrific ways every day with weapons...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radioutopistan.substack.com Mallence Bart-Williams is interconnecting many roles, topics and backgrounds. She is from Sierra-Leone and was born in Germany. She studied economics and finance in Paris, Singapore and the UK and is now based in Bali where she leads a cultural space. She is a social entrepreneur who dislikes donations and ch...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radioutopistan.substack.com In Greece so called Western democracy was invented. It is supposed to give everybody the same rights and a voice in the decision making process of the collective. But it is getting more and more obvious that this principle doesn't apply for everybody. Nevertheless the core idea of democracy is about living in...

Kübra Gümüsay ist Autorin des Bestsellers „Sprache und Sein“ und aktuell Fellow am New Institut in Hamburg, wo sie zu realen Utopien, der Politik der Imagination und und zu gerechten Zukünften forscht. Sie ist außerdem Moderatorin der Gesprächsreihe „Utopia Talks“ am Thalia Theater. Also die perfekte Partnerin, um sich über die Kraft von Utopien und konstruktiven Geschichten auszutauschen. Wir spr...

Wir bringen Palästina und die Klimakrise zusammen, tauschen Geschichten und Erfahrungen aus, und stellen mal wieder fest: Alles ist mit allem verbunden und Community is everything. Diese Episode ist der gekürzte Mitschnitt des Gesprächs im Rahmen unserer Ausstellung „Akut – Should Trees have Standing?“ in Hamburg. Wir sprachen in kleiner, intimer Runde und konnten so dem sonst üblichen Mechanismus...

Ireland is the only place in Europe that was once a colony. Because of this experience the Irish people have a very special connection to their land and to decolonial struggles around the world, says Peter Doran. Peter is a senior lecturer at the school of law at Queens University in Belfast and has been involved in the struggle for justice on the island of Ireland since many years. Within the pea...

The Los Cedros case is evidence that a more just future is possible. It is a constructive story in times when we almost only get dystopian news about the world we live in. It is a story humans need to not lose hope in democracy and civil engagement. It shows us how powerful and transforming civil society can be. How human rights and nature rights are interconnected and how justice can be implement...

It is now almost six weeks since the horrors in Israel and Palestine started – again, but this time in an unprecedented manner. It has never been so cruel so far. So much has been said about all of it already and it is still happening anyway. People are still getting killed on a daily basis by a huge military apparatus that is supported by the big Western countries of this world. Words don`t seem...

We are back from a long brake - with even more passion and new tools to interconnect visionary people and bold ideas from around the world. Our mission still is to inspire a more just future through storytelling. Through constructive storytelling. And today Elisabeth will share some insights about the power of constructive storytelling. You will learn the very basics of: * what is constructive sto...

When she had just become a journalist Ronja went to Afghanistan for almost two years. There she did reports about the war, about drug addiction, poverty and other really devastating things. Sometimes all the misery left her hopeless and without perspective. So she started to look for the constructive aspects within her stories: for people who are trying to find a way out, for projects that are off...

Carolyn Ekyarisiima wanted to become a doctor to help people. Now she is an IT-Expert training thousands of girls in Tanzania how to use technology to create the world they want to live in. She founded the organization Apps and Girls. They are teaching girls how to code. And how to use IT and technology to get their voices heard and ideas out into the world. When she founded the NGO in 2014 she wa...

Since almost 30 years the people of Intag are successfully fighting a huge open pit copper mine in the tropical Andean mountains in northern Ecuador. It´s one of the most biodivers places left on earth, there live more species per hectare than in the Amazon. But underneath it lies copper and some gold, worth millions and billions of dollar. Different transnational mining companies and also the sta...

The people of Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian Amazon are protecting their territory in a very special way. They call it Kawsak Sacha, the living forest. It grows on land under which there is a lot of oil, like in many parts of The Amazon. Helena Gualinga is one of them. She is 20 years old and her way of fighting consists of photo shoots for lifestyle magazines, of traveling to international climate co...

The problem we tackle in the first episode of our second season is huge and it is everywhere: CONCRETE It is the most widely used substance on the planet after water! And it obviously works: The Pantheon in Italy was built out of Roman concrete almost 2000 years ago and still standing. But it’s destroying nature big times: Eight percent of all carbon dioxide in the world comes from producing concr...

We’ll visit the forensic institute of Guerrero to look for a missing son, we see if Padre Fili can establish a side hustle with a Mezcal brewer for his human rights organization Centro Minerva Bello. We learn about the connection of the violence in Guerrero to drug trafficking in the US and about the connection of illegally exported weapons from Germany to the missing 43. And Padre Fili will revea...

We are in the field again for this episode: In the drug strongholds of Mexico, the violence is unimaginable and the justice system overwhelmed or even involved. Less than two percent of crimes are solved. Padre Fili disrupts the system. He spreads peace, joy and vanilla cream cake. In 2014 he set up camp in Ayotzinapa, where the 43 students disappeared. They were on their way to a demonstration, t...

We know there is way too much plastic in our world. And we produce and use more and more every day. It’s destroying ecosystems in the ocean and on land, our basis for life. In the Mexican Caribbean Antonio and Alberto play Don Quichotte every Sunday morning at 7am to fight against the windmills of plastic on our planet. They pick up the trash that came with the ocean or with careless visitors. On...

Happy New Year! What is your Utopia? For the very first episode of the new year we asked musicians from around the world to answer us this very question not with words but with music. Because music sometimes is the only language left. It can articulate feelings, complexity and even politics in a way language will never be able to do. We got some musical answers from the Altai mountains, from the c...

Exit Part I is about stories, Exit Part II about facts and strategies. Fabian Wichmann grew up with Nazis in his schoolyard. Today he is working for Exit, an organization that helps people get out of extremist circles. His Utopia: To see that people can change. That is the biggest narrative in a democracy, he says. People can come back into society. Fabian gives some hands on strategies of what to...

Part one is about stories, part two about facts and strategies. We’ll meet a Nazi-whisperer, an ex-Nazi, and a Nazi-target. Tülüfülükülümülü is a writer and actor, son of a guest working cleaning lady and a guest working taxi driver. He grew up in Bavaria and learned the hard way. His Utopia is that people don’t try the easy way in life. You can’t find easy answers to really difficult questions, h...

Kübra (32) is an author and activist in Hamburg, Germany. She just published her first book, “Language and Being”. On the interdependence of language, perception and the way we treat each other. A broad and ancient topic, but Kübra found a way to talk about it that resonates with many. It’s a bestseller allready, maybe because she speaks and lives in three languages: German, Turkish and English. ⠀...