Journey at the Edge of the Night

(First broadcast, 3rd October 2023)

“My friend Milan Kundera said that loving one another isn’t enough. That we need to know how to share the night. I and the nightingale, we share it fairly.”

Evgen Bavčar has a special ritual. For over forty years, he has been recording the nightingale singing on May nights in his hometown of Lokavec near Ajdovščina. Under the nocturnal cloak, in duet and in collaboration with the nightingale, the story from Lokavec unfolds into a narrative of the nightingales' blinding so they shall sing in perpetuity – a reflection on blindness as social castration, on existential proximities and distances, the position of the blind throughout time and the question: why should the pleasure of the night not be equal to the pleasure of the day?
The nightingale tells Dr Bavčar he is not alone in the dark. But this is not just a story of their coexistence. “When I was recording the nightingale for many years, here and in other places, a friend pointed me to the book Villa San Michele by Axel Munthe. I was taken by the text, I started to listen to nightingales in a completely different way; though I already knew that in some places birds are blinded, either nightingales or other species, to make them think it is always night,” says Evgen Bavčar, explaining the background to his interest in birds.

The night journey to the break of day raises profound questions about human existence, differences, exploitation, the struggle for justice, the environment, freedom and the intimate desire for duality, the Sun and a new spring. “When I say ‘we’, I also become responsible for another tiny existence, warming its next generation concealed in the bush. It reminds me that the sun shone the day before, that the sun once shone for me, too, and that the nightingale, in its melody, transmits to me the light or energy of the sun I knew as a child.”

Polymath Evgen Bavčar is a philosopher, artist, essayist, writer and cultural activist who was bestowed a Honorary Citizen of Europe title by the European Parliament in 2016. He is an advocate for the rights of the blind, having lost his sight at the tender age of eleven, so his world of light and visual perception remains encapsulated in the memory of his homeland, his native Lokavec. For many years, Dr Evgen Bavčar has been writing his story around the world, especially in Paris where his studies and research took him in the 1970s already. For Evgen Bavčar, sound is the companion that draws the images of his surroundings, the world, people, events and sensations.

Production is a joint project between First Program, the Ars, and Val 202 and was filmed in the spring of 2023 in Lokavec, on the island of Capri and in Naples. 

Journey at the Edge of the Night (colophon)
Concept: Mojca Delač, Luka Hvalc
Screenplay: Mojca Delač, Saška Rakef and Luka Hvalc in cooperation with Dr Evgen Bavčar
Director: Saška Rakef
Dramaturgy: Saška Rakef, Mojca Delač, Luka Hvalc
Sound design: Urban Gruden
Production: Radio Slovenia, joint undertaking of the First Program, the Ars, and Val 202 within the framework of the project B-AIR

LINK to our English translation/script (in pdf): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FK-K-a5TMeE3Ymc9dOR-JseknOfpGIFp/view?usp=sharing

Journey at the Edge of the Night

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Transcript available at: https://bit.ly/ebu002

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Transcript available at: https://bit.ly/ebu001

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Transcript available at: https://bit.ly/ebu0030

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