Radio, Roots & Revival: Partons À La Campagne’s Mission

Partons À La Campagne is a French non-profit organization dedicated to radio creation in rural or culturally isolated areas, promoting connection, expression, and intergenerational dialogue.

In 2023, they visited Romania for the first time, working with students in Buzău, Constanța, and Bucharest to produce radio shows, interviews, and soundscapes that reflect local perspectives. They were impressed by Romanians’ politeness, connection to nature, and openness to dialogue, noting how much rural life and landscapes shape the national identity.

Their mission, rooted in the aftermath of Covid-19, aims to rebuild human connection and empower individuals through storytelling and artistic expression. Looking ahead to 2025, they plan to deepen their presence in France while continuing international collaborations—potentially returning to Romania. Find out all about them in the interview below:

What is Partons À La Campagne in a nutshell?
Partons à la Campagne is a French non-profit organisation based on radio creation, more specifically towards rural or isolated communities,
most of the time living further away from culture. The organisation is based on transmission and sharing, cross-culturally or intergenerationally.
Partons À La Campagnewas created mid-lockdown, in 2020, when our founder, Fayçal Abderrezek found himself obliged to use different ways
to teach, away from his students. He is a literature and French teacher. He used radio, and discovered the ability to share, discover and enhance
transmission with this tool. This is where everything started, five years ago.

What is your object of activity? To whom you address and what is the goal of your organization?
Each summer, the organisation goes to rural places in the north of France, to meet inhabitants, next to whom we create discussion spaces,
interviewing each person that is ready to live the experience. It is always funny to approach someone saying “I don’t have anything to say”, which soon turns into 2.5 hours of rush to edit.

We also organise some workshops and games for children to discover more about radio and how to use it. We usually stay a week or so at each location. At the end of this week, we organise a restitution show, in which everyone is invited. The sounds we created are being listened to, and some guests are invited to speak up to the audience. When we meet musicians for example, they are able to perform. It is always a beautiful moment of sharing.
The goal is to create links, connections, make people more aware of where they live, who are their neighbors. And of course, promote radio
creation.

What projects did you implement in Romania last year and what were the results?
Last summer we were in Romania for three weeks working in three different cities: Buzău, Constanța, București. It has been the first time for
every single member of our team in this country but we had organised our trip in collaboration with local actors. In Colegiul Național Mihai
Eminescu of Buzău we have led two projects which ultimately constituted a radio show. The latter has been presented by the children themselves and has been hosted in the school in front of an audience and video broadcasted online thanks to our technicians. A first group of young teenagers who had just begun to learn French created a radio fiction.

We accompanied them from the invention of the story to the recording and acting of the script and sound effects. As for the other group, constituted of high school students, we established a list of interviews and atmospheres to be recorded that would represent their own experience of their town. We even dubbed interviews conducted in Romanian. Also, these two projects were illustrated by photographs taken by a member of our organisation.
Then, in the office of the Alliance Française of Constanta we guided a group of high school students and an undergraduate student through the
creation of the radio show. We decided together the topics and the types of audio productions we wanted to encapsulate. In addition to the
interviews in French and Romanian, we experimented with a “sound postcard” format: an audio recording of the city’s atmosphere.
Finally, in the capital we worked on our own and produced a show in an independent bookshop. Even if we could not resist producing interviews ourselves in the previous cities, this last week was entirely devoted to our encounters.

What are the plans for 2025?
This year we planned to continue our activities with local organisation in the North-East of France, especially regarding intergenerational
relationships in small towns. 2025 will also mark a shift in our desire to develop our organisation, for instance by anchoring ourselves
somewhere. We will soon announce some information about this on social media (@radiopalc) and on our website (radiopalc.fr). Besides, we
actively work on other local and international projects we are utterly excited about. Finally, as usual, we will be back on the roads with our
microphones to discover new stories, to meet new people, and to photograph new places. Once again, Romania may very likely be one of
those destinations.

One of the pillars of your mission is people interaction. How would you characterize Romanians? What would they excel in and what are they flaws, as people, citizens?
Foremost, we absolutely enjoyed interacting with Romanians. Through our four-year experience as an organisation we have met a vast range of
different people from many countries and some vague peculiarities appeared to us. We would say that Romanians are unique regarding
their tact, and politeness. We were never refused something but gradually we understood that some ‘yes, why not’ simply meant ‘no,
sorry’. And it is somehow lovely. On a lighter note, we were also astonished and amused by the fact that Romanians actually cross the
road on zebra crossing and wait for the pedestrian traffic light to turn green. As French people it was kind of unusual, to say the least. But after
all, wherever you go you find humans that are fundamentally welcoming, interesting, and funny.

Romania’s many assets gravitate around its nature environment, resources, landscapes, rural life. Do you think that they are fully capitalized by our country? And if there is more room for projects based on these concepts?

It is complicated for us to say as we stayed only for three weeks in Romania. Besides, we only discovered urban areas. Nonetheless, we felt
this energy, this leaning towards nature. Many of the people we encountered told us the importance rural life has had in their
development. For instance, in Constanța we have witnessed the powerful relation the population has with the sea. Even in Bucharest or Buzău, we have been surprised by the plethora of parks and squares. We are definitely eager to discover the countryside and the various Romanian
landscapes.

You also assert on the NGO’s Facebook page that you plant to rebuild connections between people after months of reduced social interactions due to health measures…do you refer to the isolation prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic? After 5 years how do you think the lockdown still impact people’s life?
We indeed refer to the isolation prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Even before that, connections were still to be enhanced and put together,
as we need to stay connected to each other to make sure we live respectful of what is surrounding us.
We still think that the lockdown has impacted a lot of lives. It was unexpected, many were not ready to be forced to stay at home during that amount of time. We saw it mostly on students, because that is who we are surrounded by. They all needed to find new ways to learn, evolve,
socialise while being at home. We think it had a lot of consequences on their ability to become young adults. That is why we think transmission is important, because it shows the will people have to share the best part of themselves. Everyone has a talent, something to say, something they believe in, and that is something they should be proud of. And it is even more interesting when this transmission is operated by using art or culture.