Radio Papesse / LUCIA Festival, along with the National Diary Archive Foundation Pieve Santo Stefano, present the third edition of the LUCIA Award for audio production. 

Since 2006, Radio Papesse has promoted and supported experimental audio production, inviting artists and producers to challenge the rules of radio and audio narration. We continue to do so by joining forces with the Diary Archive and inviting podcasters and authors to engage with its incredible heritage, which includes almost 10,000 diaries, memoirs and epistolaries that have been collected in Pieve Santo Stefano since 1984. 

The LUCIA Award 2022 is aimed at an ever-growing community of talented producers and artists, it invites them to translate these small but great private lives into audio stories, to work around diaries that speak of bodies and their multiple and changing identities, their excesses, challenges and ruptures; of those bodies that are caught up in the folds of History – such as the First World War tormented and mutilated bodies Giuseppe Salvemini writes about; of those that have managed to rewrite their own story, like Tania Ferrucci – who speaks out loud about the long journey of transition and freedom of a woman born a boy – Thierno Sadou Sow and Seydi Rodriguez Gutierrez, who have gone beyond seas and borders to meet their dreams, or Valerio Daniel De Simoni, who left and never returned from an epic journey but who’s still affecting many other peoples’ lives.

Read the synopsis, choose a diary and think about how you would like to retell it.
Write us (2000 characters max.) how you would translate it into audio: remember, the LUCIA Award is for productions in Italian.

What do we expect?

A proposal for the production of a new work of max. 30 minutes in Italian.
We are looking for proposals that enhance the diaries, at the same time using all the possibilities of audio storytelling. We are looking for quality and sound-rich productions.

Who can participate?

The Award is open to young producers and established professionals. You can participate alone or with a production group, if you are a collective or a theater company: prior experiences in narrative audio production or familiarity with audio storytelling will be favorably valued. 

Whatever your language might be, the Lucia Award is only for productions in Italian. 

What do you get?

Lucia awards two projects with € 2,500.00 (1° prize) and € 1.000,00 (2° prize).

The audio works will be released on radiopapesse.org and on the digital storytelling platform of the Diary Archive. It will also be presented at the 2023 Pieve Award, and Radio Papesse is committed to supporting its national and international circulation. 

How can you participate?

To participate you must:

1. fill in the registration form [where you will be asked to upload a portfolio and the receipt of payment of the € 10.00 registration fee];
2. once you have filled in the registration form, you will receive a link to access a few extracts of the diary;
3. send your production proposal to premiolucia@radiopapesse.org no later than 11.00 PM on November 25th, 2022.

We encourage you to fill in the application form as soon as possible, so that you will have enough time to read the diary, do some research and think your proposal through before the deadline.

For any further doubts or questions, please write to premiolucia[at]radiopapesse.org

The shortlist of selected proposals will be released by Monday, December 5th, 2022. 

The winning projects of this third edition of the LUCIA Award will be announced during the LUCIA Festival, on Sunday, December 11th, 2022.

The jury’s motivation will be published on the luciafestival.org website. 

The diaries

The JURY is composed of the following members: 

• ADN – Natalia Cangi, Tiziano Bonini
• Carolina Valencia Caceido
• Todo Modo Libreria – Maddalena Fossombroni e Pietro Torrigiani 
• Radio Papesse – Ilaria Gadenz and Carola Haupt

Carolina Valencia Caicedo is a Colombian podcast producer based in Boston. She studied Philosophy at the Universidad del Valle (Cali, Colombia), Art History and Criticism at the Università Statale in Milan and she holds a master’s degree in Audio Storytelling from the 24 Ore Business School. Since 2015, he has been involved in writing and producing sound and audiovisual documentaries in Colombia and Italy. In 2021, her podcast series Catarsis, un proceso consentido was among the finalists of the Hearsay Audio Festival. In 2020, he co-founded the production company Botafuego Audio, a sound storytelling laboratory that produces and promotes radio works and podcasts, in Spanish and Italian, as well as educational projects and audio storytelling workshops.

Tiziano Bonini is Associate Professor in Sociology of Cultural and Communicative Processes at the Department of Social, Political and Cognitive Sciences, University of Siena. He works on radio, social media, digital culture and the political economy of digital platforms. 

He has published books on radio (including Radio Audiences and Participation in the Age of Network Society, Routledge, 2015), on media and globalization (Così lontano, così vicino. Tattiche mediali per abitare lo spazio, Ombre Corte, 2010). 

He’s been doing radio since he was a student at the University of Siena. Between 2004 and 2019 he worked for Radio Svizzera Italiana, Radio2 Rai, Radio24, Radio3 Rai.

Maddalena Fossombroni and Pietro Torrigiani are the co-founders of Todo Modo bookshop and initiators of Testo, an independent publishing fair promoted by Pitti Immagine.

Radio Papesse is a webradio and online audio archive devoted to contemporary art. It works with museums and cultural institutions to talk about art practices today. It hosts and commissions experimental sound and radiophonic works, inviting artists and producers to renew the rules of broadcasting and audio narration.

Among its current projects are:

YASS! an international mentorship & training program for audio makers; LUCIA Festival, a festival dedicated to the listening of radio works and podcasts; Süden Radio…

Between 2018 and 2020 it was associate researcher of Pratiques d’Hospitalité – Platform for critical research and political imagination at ESAD Grenoble • Valence. It is a member of the scientific board of the Interdepartmental Research Center for Radiophony at UNIRSM – Università di San Marino. It adopts the Creative Commons License and is part of the RADIA network.

The Fondazione Archivio Diaristico Nazionale (ADN) was born in 1984 out of the desire of its founder Saverio Tutino to build a place of memory, in which to collect and preserve private records (diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, correspondence…) that could gradually outline and narrate the history of Italy, as well as its social and cultural evolutions. From its origins, Savero Tutino wanted the Archive to be a ‘memory nursery’, to disseminate and promote its documentary heritage, to make this collective history accessible to all.

Nowadays the Archive stores more than 9,000 diaries: they convey the many historical, socio-cultural and even linguistic changes of Italian and European society.partecipi dei molteplici cambiamenti storico-socio-culturali ed anche linguistici della società italiana ed europea.

Premio Lucia is possible thanks to the support of Fondazione CR Firenze, Comune di Firenze, Regione Toscana Toscanaincontemporanea 2022, Città Metropolitana di Firenze, Unicoop Firenze.