Dear Harbor Radio

A nomadic bike-powered interspecies love letter writing and recording studio that roamed the shores of Buzzards Bay, Boston Harbor, and the Merrimack River in Lowell, MA in 2019-2020.  
A project of Plotform: Jane D. Marsching + Andi Sutton

A story for you

Here we are in the Anthropocene, confronting a changing climate and radically and speedily changing global ecological system.  Climate weirding, and human and non-human losses is ever more in the public consciousness. It’s a staggering narrative of loss defined by threatening and breaking strands of the web of life.  One can imagine these strands floating through the air, seeking re-connection, but missing it in the chaotic climate disruption.
A newly hatched pollinator seeking harbor in the flowering tree that bloomed at the wrong time, now resting on a bare branch.
A migrating whale lost from her pod, her navigation confused by sonar noise, beached on a far shore.
A maple sugaring outfit stymied by not enough cold at all the wrong times, concerned about the sap flows.
A fishery pulling nets up empty, despite soaring demand.

It’s a super sad, true love story.  

Dear Harbor Radio is at once a bike-pulled mobile radio station, a writing and recording studio, and a series of public interventions that took place in 2019-20 in New Bedord, Boston, and Lowell, MA. The project takes the form of a mobile letter writing and recording station where participants were invited to write and record love letters to other-than-human species. We activated the cart on the patio of a whaling museum, at a street art festival, as part of a fundraiser for a local bird advocacy organization, on a boat cruise across the New Bedford harbor, and in multiple university galleries and classroom settings.

Our invitation to project participants was simple: think of something in the natural world that you love and that you might want to celebrate, speak to, or reconnect with. Write it a letter and read it aloud, imagining you are speaking directly to your beloved.  Through love letters, members of the public honored their loves with drawings, words, laughter, singing, and tears. The 110 collected letters that comprise our archive reflect a beautiful accumulation of celebration, longing, and attention to our complex and fragile world. 

As we biked the project to these different locations, people brought to us stories of so many human/other-than-human relationships that are central to their own experiences of ecological love and loss. We recorded these letters in the moment and later combined the participants’ words with recorded sounds of the creatures to whom the letters were written and love songs to the other-then-human from the past 100 years. The letters were written to animals, minerals, plants, places, moments, humans: such as a bear, pets, Mother Nature, a rock, the ocean, laughing gulls, narwhales, and so many more.

The radio broadcast

In this 2+hour sound piece, close to 100 participants in the Dear Harbor Radio read, cried, and sung the love letters they wrote as part of this project.  In it you will hear love expressed in a myriad of forms: letters, observations, recordings, songs, conversations–a series of calls of love from humans to non-humans and back again.

This sound piece was broadcast via pirate radio transmitter at 98.3 on the radio dial.  With a radius of a quarter of a mile, the transmitter was powerful enough to interrupt other broadcasts, resulting in momentary messages of love entering the soundscapes of any radio listener who passed by the cart.  It is now available as a streaming audio file, available on Soundcloud.

View the playlist here.

Appearances:

  • 6/29/19 10-1 outside the New Bedford Whaling Museum

  • 7/11/19 5-8 AHA night, Outside the University Art Gallery, CVPA Starr Store Building • New Bedford

  • 8/11/19 11-2 Allens Pond Duck Derby, Allens Pond Wildlife Sanctuary

  • 9/16/19 5-8 Local Ecologies, exhibition opening, University Hall Gallery, UMass Boston

  • 9/28/19 Harbor Boat Letter Writing Journey, New Bedford Harbor

  • 10/3/19 Writing Workshop with UMass Dartmouth students

  • 10/23/19 Letter Writing event with Creative Writing for the Environment students at UMass Boston

  • 11/14/19 Local Ecologies, exhibition opening, University Art Gallery, Star Store Campus, UMass Dartmouth

  • 11/18/19 12-2, Writing Workshop with UMass Dartmouth Arts Ambassador Gina Pantalone

  • 12/4/19 12-2, Writing Workshop with UMass Dartmouth Arts Ambassador Gina Pantalone

  • 1/20/20 Local Ecologies, exhibition, UMass Lowell

The Harbor Cruise

On September 28th, 2019, we took to the waves with the cart in an invitation-only New Bedford harbor cruise and writing/reading session.  Participants were nourished with aphrodisiac foods–chocolate and figs–and treated to an artist talk that took the form of love letters.  Participants then wrote their own love letters and, reading in the direction of their other-than-human objects of affection, spoke their letters to the wind.

Exhibitions:

Dear Harbor Radio was part of the art exhibition Local Ecologies, which includes contemporary, place-based art practices that bring our ecologies and land use histories into new focus. It was commissioned by the Visiting Artists Program of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at UMass Dartmouth, under the curatorial vision of Rebecca Uchill.    Local Ecologies, the exhibition, opened at UMass Boston on September 26, 2019, and travelled to UMass Dartmouth, opening on November 14th, and then to UMass Lowell, beginning on January 21, 2020.  

The book of letters

  • “Dear readers,”

  • “Dear other-than-humans,”

  • “Dear love letters,”

  • “Dear companions,”

  • “Dear listening,”

  • “Dear harbors,”

  • “Dear love,”

These are the salutations that begin the seven love letters that make up this 22-page illustrated book. These letters are meditations as well as instructions, and together serve as a document of Dear Harbor Radio that captures for a reader the sense of communication and connection that an in-person encounter with the piece itself would do.  Now existing as a downloadable PDF, it is available to anyone who wishes to activate their own letter writing and reading experience whether solitary or collective. 

Dear Harbor Radio biking the harbor, 2019.
Video 12:49

This video documents the travels of Dear Harbor Radio through various locations in Massachusetts harbors, from New Bedford to Boston, in 2019.  It was displayed on the cart during all exhibitions, public events, and love letter writing gatherings.