Over the past years MA Sound Arts students at LCC have been asked to make a piece of work in response to the Her Noise Archive. This has been the first project set in their one year course. It is a practice based research project where the expectation is that they carry out a scholarly investigation of aspects of the archive, which might include feminism, gender and sound arts, queer theories, the nature of the archive, masculine studies, DIY arts and music practices etc. and to produce an artwork that is influenced and fed by that research. Some of that work is collected here.
Anna Raimondo
Untitled (silences and hesitations)
Duration: 08:00
Performance: Anna Raimondo
Video editing: Camila Mello
Sound recording: Andrej Bako
When I presented “La regla de la mùsica”, a radio show examining music and feminism(s), I conducted interviews with female composers and musicians. Often, when asked about female influences, these women would hesitate to answer. I used these silences and hesitations as the source material for a piece. I rendered it on cassette-tape and played it back to people in public spaces. Silence, over the language and its structure, could question or resist the dualism between genders. These particular silences musically empower the sounds of the environment and conceptually emphasise the hesitations of the official historiography to include women in musical canons.
Sunil Chandy
The Folding Map
The Folding Map explores the cultural and geographical assumptions in the assembling of the Her Noise Map and problems and possibilities they create. The map is referred to as ‘a momentary snapshot of a pulsating labyrinth of women in sonic experimentation’. This ‘snapshot’ centres itself around the US, the UK and Germany. This in itself isn’t prejudicial or erroneous but accentuates the map as a starting point. A question then arises as to what happens next.
Three female sound artists Hildegard Von Bingen, Sofia Gubaidulina and Elizabeth Cotten were chosen from the map for their ‘outsiderness’ within the map, in terms of milieu, musical style and race.
Initially the work hoped to point to artists geographically and culturally outside the map but certain contradictions made themselves evident around the notion of ‘expanding’ the map. Expansion seemed to connote a certain colonial imposition on the evolution of the map. To move away from this ‘expansion’ a converse movement was chosen, that of folding in.
The work explores the act of folding the map and the possible effects this has.
Sophie Mallett
www.feministhypnosis.com (website no longer active)
website + audio: duration 04:39
Instructions for how to share www.feministhypnosis.com
- Gather a group of friends, colleagues or even strangers. They can be from either sex or anything in between, just make sure they’re unsure of feminism.
- Have everyone download the hypnosis from www.feministhypnosis.com to play back on their own device – they’ll need a pair of headphones too.
- Sit together in a darkened, but not completely dark, space.
- Read the website aloud, focusing on the section ‘Is it for You’. This will relieve anxiety and apprehension (although not completely) towards the hypnosis.
- Play the hypnosis simultaneously.
- Await a subtle, gradual, collective transformation.
Aurélie Mermod
Women in Sound Arts: Travel Kit
In response to the Her Noise Archive I have complied an assemblage with elements of my research on women in sound arts. I used books, zines, magazines, audio tapes or personal items as hardware objects to build a mobile archive (Appendix A). I decided to use the access that is offered by the approach of infokiosques: objects are free to touch, hear, they connect to each other. The Her Noise Archive is composed of many punk records and zines but it is ironic that these materials are taken care of in a way that considers that these objects should be protected from destruction, as if they need to be indestructible. Through use the pages of books will be damaged, records scratched and items lost. The Women in Sound Arts: Travel Kit takes the archive out of its temperature controlled room and unpacks the documents from their boxes, takes away the shelves and enables the use of the materials for artworks, exhibitions and participatory spaces. I recycled two second hand suitcases to play with the idea of a travel kit to which I added some wooden pieces, found on the street, which are shaped like books. I incorporated a usb stick that contains the materials of my research into the wooden pieces : videos, movies, audio, podcasts, books, web articles and all my internet research. My intention is to share my research and to create an open source mobile archive. The key artists and writers of my research are: Martha Rosler, Emma Hedditch, Sanja Ivekovic, bell hooks and Maryanne Amacher.
aureliemermod.ch
Alison Ballard
Her Noise Archive: Symbol of Democracy or Communist Uprising?
Video Duration: 05:12
Her Noise Archive: Symbol of Democracy or Communist Uprising? considers the distinction between what constitutes political criticism and rebellion within sound arts practice. It is a sardonic observation of the ambivalent political voice of the Her Noise Archive which serves equally as a democratic symbol of equality and, simultaneously, as an uprising against the false utopia of democracy. By presenting both truths side-by-side the stark similarities between these two viewpoints are made apparent and it’s political fragility laid bare. An archive may be created democratically but it can easily become bound to an authoritarian existence by those who control its access, changing its political locale overnight.
Her Noise Archive: Symbol of Democracy or Communist Uprising? extends beyond critique of the Her Noise Archive and passes question upon political party structures and the fine line between one party’s politics and another. Applying the same structure and techniques of manipulating rhythm, pitch and repetition I explore the possibilities of speech as a political tool within the arts.