Discover This Pandemic Audio Time Capsule: Ochenta Stories

Over the pandemic year(s), Studio Ochenta collected 80 stories from around the world for its anthology series: Ochenta Stories, a crowdsourced series that asks each author, “What would you like to hear when the pandemic is over?”?

As the pandemic comes to a close in many parts of the world, the team reflects on the show and its impact. CEO and Founder of Ochenta Studio, Lory Martinez came up with the idea during the strictest part of lockdown, the premier confinement in Paris. She remembers, “We weren’t able to go outside more than a kilometer. It was really intense, those first two months everyone was really scared.”?

When we couldn’t physically travel very far, we could travel with our ears, remembering a time when we could hop on a train and “just go somewhere.” We wanted “people to be able to listen and be transported.”

And so Ochenta Stories was born.

At first, the plan was to produce the podcast in the languages spoken by the Ochenta Team: English, French, Spanish and Italian. But, as submissions kept coming in from all around the world, she decided to start producing episodes in the language spoken by each author. “I’ve always wanted to have that motto of ‘Raising voices across cultures’ actually be represented across all of our shows, and I think Ochenta Stories was a really good example of that,” says Martinez.

80 episodes later, the team has produced episodes in over 13 different languages!?

While this was no easy task, every member of the team, in the end, is happy to have taken it on.?

Producer Maru Lombardo, fluent in English and Spanish, produced in Italian and Korean, among other languages. “What really struck me was the collaborative nature of the project. We worked closely with creators and had to trust another set of ears for this podcast to be the best version it could be.”

Producer Chiara Santella, fluent in English and Italian, sound-designed episodes in Polish, Vietnamese, and Mongolian. “It was beautiful because I was basically learning how those languages sound as I was producing them. It was a challenge, but it was fun!”

We also asked the team some of their favorite episodes.?

Producer Clizia Sala chose Radio Insomnio, “because, in this short fiction set in Barcelona, a woman with chronic insomnia contemplates her city from her balcony in sort of a dreamlike state. I could sort of identify with the main character. I spent many nights awake contemplating the city.”

Assistant Producer Hailey Choi chose Dear Bicycles. “It’s about how Maria Clara, had taken up cycling again during the pandemic, because it was really the only way to get around safely. She would discover parts of the city that she had never really seen before. It’s one of the small ways the pandemic helped us find beauty in hard times."

Assistant Producer Zeina Abouelmakarem chose Sword Dance. For her, this episode led to a friendship with the author. During production, they had only met virtually, but when we could all gather in person again, they ran into each other in the same university course. Zeina says, “this is a show about the pandemic, and it taught us how we can meet others online without actually knowing what they look like, but still connect somehow.”

Host and sound designer Luis Lopez chose the very first episode in the series, The Bus. He says, "When I listened to it, I was blown away. The story, where the main character hops on a bus to visit her younger self, is set in Scotland, but when I heard it, the bus from the story took me back to Mexico with my loved ones. I felt that this was exactly the kind of thing I needed to hear at a time when I was alone and far from home.”

The series serves as a time capsule of our collective experience. ?

You can listen to the episodes and hear how people progressively felt differently over the year and a half. We have stories of people doing their applause. That was so early on in the pandemic, you hear that story now and you’re like “oh, I remember the first month.”

The pandemic isn't over yet. And it’s hard to tell when it will end for good. But what Luis Lopez wants us to remember about the pandemic is, “in isolating us and preventing us from living our daily lives like we used to, from traveling, from celebrating, and from grieving together, it has, against all odds, brought us together.”

On a final note, when the pandemic finally does end, Clizia Sala wants us to “have a sort of historic memory of what happened. I would like all of us to turn to our neighbors, to the passersby, to the people we don’t know, and reckon that we are all part of humanity.”

And you can do just that any time you like by visiting the Ochenta Studio website where all 80 episodes of this audio documentary are preserved.?

Just have a listen.

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About:?Studio Ochenta?is a multilingual podcast studio dedicated to raising voices across cultures. Ochenta is home to many multilingual shows including the 2020 Webby and Lovie Award honored series?Mija, an audio drama on the journeys of immigrant families. Studio Ochenta's fiction and narrative shows span 25+ languages, have hit #1 in over 31 countries collectively, and have been featured in the New York Times, El Pais, Forbes, and more.??Learn more about our work and find transcriptions for our Deaf and HOH community on our website:?ochentastudio.com