STAR Radio was a broadcasting event that happened in Cardiff in 2005, initiated by artist, and Tremorfa resident, Jennie Savage. STAR was produced/ supported/ managed by CBAT (now Safle).

The project took over 2 years to complete and concluded with a 1 Week radio broadcast, an exhibition at the National Museum and Galleries of Wales and a publication, ’STAR a Psychotopography of Place‘, which contained the audio as an archive on DVD. The audio was also available online for 2 years after the project’s conclusion.

In Brief:
The STAR area can be found on the Eastern side of Cardiff and comprises of the suburban wards of Splott, Tremorfa, Adamsdaown and Roath, (making the acronym, STAR). Through the STAR Radio project, Jennie to sought to explore and map this area in order to create an audio archive that represented a multiplicity of voices from this place.

STAR Radio was based in a shop on Clifton Street for 6 months. The shop formed a hub for the project, people came into make radio programmes, drop off music and take part.

The ‘art’ occurred in the process; the encounters, relations and interactions that happened over the course of the project, and the way the broadcast developed and unfolded, a process that was made visible (or audiable) through the broadcast as an intervention. The exhibition of the audio archive at the National Museum and galleries of Wales took this process and gave it validity within the conventions and heirachies ordinarily associated with ‘representation’. It worked on two levels, symbolically, taking the voices from the street and inserting them in a National institution, those voices becoming ‘valid’ in the annals of history. Secondly, the museum was a point of mediation that took the audio to a wider audience, and sought to deliver the 116 hours of recorded sound as an archive, which constructed links and narratives between the (Material, formed it and gave it definition).

The archive is also presented in the STAR radio book as a DVD.