Nada Smiljanić

I had the great joy of working on four Empathy Museum audio projects in recent years.

In 2020, I produced two short stories for the From Where I’m Standing series about life during the Covid-19 pandemic. I worked with two wonderful, courageous contributors: Alex, a nurse, and Claire, who was a funeral director. Their stories (which I recorded, edited and sound designed) and their portraits were exhibited on ‘For Sale’-style signs outside homes on Dalberg Road in Brixton, and later at Sceaux Gardens Estate in Peckham. Passers-by were invited to look at the photos and scan a QR code to listen to the audio stories.

In late 2020, I produced 9 stories for the ESOL mini-series of A Mile in My Shoes, a project which, in its physical iteration, is a pop-up ‘shoe shop’. It invites visitors to select a shoe box containing a pair of shoes and an MP3 player, and ‘walk a mile’ (not literally) in the owner’s shoes while listening to their story.

The ESOL mini-series was a collaboration between Empathy Museum, Boldface and CityLit, offering storytelling workshops to people learning English as a second language. The podcast series is the end result of these workshops, and my role was to record interviews with the ESOL participants, and edit and sound design their stories. I received training from senior producer Jesse Lawson. The other producer on the project was Kit Callin, and the Exec Producer was Izzy Yon. The stories were featured in the Mile in My Shoes installation at Southbank Centre in October 2021, as part of London Literature Festival.

I worked with Boldface and Empathy Museum again in late 2021, and in spring 2022, on a further two series: Down the Rabbit Hole and Our Justice. Our Justice is a mini-series of true stories and conversations co-produced by young people with experience of the Scottish Justice System, made in collaboration with Community Justice Scotland. My role was to edit and sound design the interviews recorded by producers Jesse Lawson and Arlie Adlington.

Down the Rabbit Hole was made in collaboration with Women in Prison and National Prison Radio. Women accessing services at The Beth Centre in Lambeth were invited to attend workshops on storytelling, and I edited and sound designed the stories and audio letters they came up with. I also edited an hour-long radio show version of the Down the Rabbit Hole project for National Prison Radio.