Young Voices on the Airwaves: Rebel Resistors Radio Club Inspire at Cork Midsummer Festival
Rebel Resistors Radio Club at Cork Midsummer Festival 2025 - Cork, Ireland / Photograph Jed Niezgoda - jedniezgoda.com
In a captivating blend of creativity, activism, and analogue technology, twelve spirited girls from Cork, aged nine and ten, took to the airwaves this June as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival. Their stage wasn’t a theatre or gallery—but rather a radio that they built themselves. These young creators became part of the Rebel Resistors Radio Club, an innovative participatory art project that placed the voices and ideas of children at the very heart of the city’s cultural celebration.
The initiative was spearheaded by internationally renowned performance duo Action Hero—Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse—known for their work exploring collective power, resistance, and imagination. Through the Rebel Resistors Radio Club, Action Hero invited children to become broadcasters, technicians, and visionaries in their own right.
Over several days, the girls from Cork’s South Lee Educate Together National School not only built their own functioning analogue radios and antennas, but also wrote and recorded powerful manifestos expressing their dreams, concerns, and demands for the future.
Framed by big, bold questions—Where are we going? Who holds the power? How can we resist together?—the project became a space for reflection, empowerment, and collaboration. The young participants were encouraged to think critically about the world they’re growing up in and to voice the kind of future they want to help create.
Their manifestos touched on a wide range of topics—from climate change and equality, to kindness in leadership and the need for more playgrounds and safer streets. The radio broadcasts gave them a platform to not only imagine alternatives but to claim a sense of agency in shaping the world.
Lead artist, Gemma Paintin told The Echo: “Especially at that age, you know like from nine to ten, the girls are kind of on the cusp of adolescence and are coming into an understanding of the world, their place in the world and how they understand it or not.”
“Equality was a big issue for them. They were talking a lot about wanting more homes and wanting fairness between boys and girls. They were thinking about girls in leadership and also wanting better leaders. We had fun and there was also a bit of a range from, you know, wanting a half day of school on Friday and free chocolate.”
Working with tiny transmitters, the girls learned how to assemble radios by hand and each was given their own frequency.
For many, this was their first time engaging with any methods of communication outside of the internet, which Gemma found to be an important aspect to consider when choosing the medium in which to convey the young girl’s messages.
“I'm really interested in technologies that we might consider to be like old technologies. There is something really interesting for me about radio because it's not reliant on the Internet. You can use it without power. It can be transmitted. You can listen to it anonymously,” she explained.
“Of course, in some countries radio is still the most prevalent form of communication. We're seeing it in Ukraine and Gaza, that digital infrastructure is actually very fragile and it's really easy for governments or even the likes of Elon Musk to just turn off Twitter. Radio uses the electromagnetic spectrum, which is the naturally occurring properties of the universe and that belongs to everyone. You can't turn it off.”
The Rebel Resistors Radio Club wasn’t hidden away in a classroom—it is being broadcast live from the heart of Cork City. Passersby can tune into the girls’ transmissions and hear their manifestos echoing across the airwaves as part of the Midsummer Festival in St. Peter’s Church from June 16 to 21.
In this way, the entire city of Cork will became their audience. Visitors to the exhibit are invited to come and listen to each of the 12 radios, where each frequency is a message from a different child. The six-minute-long broadcasts are accompanied by a photograph of the participating girl and some information about them.
Supported by Cork Child Friendly City and Cork City Council, the project was part of a growing international network, with similar initiatives launched in Germany, the UK, and beyond. It reinforced Cork’s commitment to nurturing creativity, diversity, and participation at all levels of the community.
The Rebel Resistors Radio Club is more than a single exhibit—it’s part of Action Hero’s long-term artistic mission to explore how people come together to imagine and rehearse new worlds. Their work has appeared in over 40 countries, always with a strong emphasis on co-creation, activism, and radical joy.
In Cork, that mission came to life through the eyes and voices of twelve girls. Their broadcasts reminded audiences of the importance of listening to young people.
The Rebel Resistors Radio Club has set the dial to a different frequency—one that values the voices of our young people and hopes to make waves of change for future generations.
