oHPo radio is a space for the art school at Sheffield Hallam University. It grew from conversations about how to be together during a pandemic.   

 

In 2020 the pandemic dissolved many things we took for granted about working in an art school and being part of artistic networks and communities. Social distancing prevented conventional forms of face to face teaching and historic ways of convening and practicing in studios. The pandemic collapsed the (already unstable) economic and material structures of artistic dissemination and assembly, in its ferocious exacerbation of existing inequalities. 

 

In response to this situation fine art staff at the Old Head Post Office (the art school at Sheffield Hallam University) proposed a radio space. We thought radio might offer ways to spend time together in a similar way to studio occupancy: developing work while being part of an ongoing conversation. Radio listening doesn’t demand that you drop everything to pay attention, or that you must go to a certain space, or present your face on zoom, it weaves into daily time. Radio listening merges with the materiality of our own spaces or work, as studio conversation does. Radio listening conjures an imaged or real community of other listeners, but digital radio means it’s not limited to airwave length. We could make a temporally present community that passed through the walls of the University and spread its resources via the digital airwaves. Radio offers an environment that can be for developing ideas and sharing finished work at the same time: its time, space and textures can destabilise these expectations. It is a space of low material and financial risk, a space to try stuff out, working light, fast and playfully, as well as with painstaking attention and precision. 

 

While oHPo is a radio space for the art school it also offers the potential to escape the art school, or to imagine and materialise new art schools (utopian, dystopian, anti-art, classical, miniature, baroque, epic etc), in a multitude of digital and acoustic corners. We invite participation from all corners of SHU and the wider community, and all forms of material including field recordings, interviews, stories, essays as well as encouraging experimental and non-definable forms of submission. We are interested in all scales of input, from single works to curated seasons.