Over the past few years, Aurélie Charon and Caroline Gillet have travelled to Algiers, Moscow, Tehran, Istanbul, Sarajevo, Beirut, Gaza, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and a number of other cities in France and elsewhere in Europe, to sound out the imagination of their generation. For a series of radio programmes, the duo, both journalists and producers and born in 1985 and 1984 respectively, have met with young people from many different social milieux, listening to them express their thoughts about their everyday lives and their hopes for the future. Radio Live serves as a three-dimensional extension of this youth-oriented project.

In 2018 and 2019, the Foundation is supporting the production of Radio Live in the Bobigny area – a district to the north of Paris – and its presentation at the MC93. On stage, local young people are interviewed by Charon and Gillet, while illustrator Amélie Bonnin creates live sketches and videos that are projected to form a backdrop for the discussions, to the sound of a live musical accompaniment. The piece combines the pre-recorded elements of a more classic radio piece with spontaneous speech and improvised interactions.

Over the course of the conversations it stages, Radio Live reveals the state of mind of a socially conscious generation. Rather than delivering speeches, the guests share their own life stories and their personal revolutions. They are far from cynical, and all express a desire to actively participate in society: a community of young people who offer optimistic and even joyful visions of the present and the future. Charon and Gillet confirm that their guests “have no desire to belong to an era sacrificed to economic crisis, fear, the loss of hope and of utopias”. The staging of their words and voices thus offers precious and emotionally powerful moments of exchange and sharing.