In the months of April, May and June 1994, an estimated 800,000 to 1,000,000 members of the Tutsi minority as well as thousands of centrist Hutu were murdered in the Central African state of Rwanda. The means were extremely simple – machetes, clubs, a few guns. Yet probably the most important instrument of the genocide was the “Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines” (RTLM).
With incredible cynicism, employees at the popular station had prepared the genocide for months, just like an advertising campaign. The programme consisted of pop music, exciting sports broadcasts, political commentaries and calls for murder of unsurpassable contempt. In the studio’s few square metres, the grooves of the most up-to-date Congolese bands and the most aggressive race baiting combined here into a dark laboratory of racist ideology. The project «Hate Radio» puts RTLM back on the air, broadcasting from a true reproduction of the studio. A scenic installation reconstructed from documents and eyewitness accounts allows the audience to sense and re-experience how racism functions and how humans are denied their humanity.