Son[i]a #243
Marysia Lewandowska
The Women’s Audio Archive is a collection of recordings of private conversations, seminars, talks, conferences, and public events that Polish-born, London based artist Marysia Lewandowska carefully compiled from 1985 to 1990. Over 200 hours of audio that began as a fictitious archive that provided an interface and a cover for approaching key female figures in the arts and talking to them at length. The ideas and concerns of the second wave of feminism run through these mostly informal recordings, underpinned by Marysia’s intuition and her desire “to write that history with them, and to find myself in the present.”
In 2009, Lewandowska was invited by Maria Lind, Director of the Centre for Curatorial Studies (Bard College, NY) at the time, to digitize the material and work with the collection in an effort of making it available online and decided to turn this private collection into an online public archive under a Creative Commons license. The process includes documenting the negotiations involved in bringing about this change of status, twenty years later.
SON(I)A talks to Marysia Lewandowska about the Women’s Audio Archive, about the crucial need to generate counter-narratives in totalitarian regimes, about networking before networks, about the boundaries between the private and the public, the negotiations generated by the shift from one sphere to another, the responsibilities of the archive, and the potential to generate conversation through art.
This podcast includes fragments from the Women’s Audio Archive and the voices of (in order of appearance): Marysia Lewandowska, Nourbese Philip, Nan Goldin, Nancy Spero, Allan Kaprow, Jo Spence, Lynne Tillman, Donald Judd, Maureen O. Paley, Susan Hiller, Lynne Tillman, Judy Chicago. The complete recordings are available at Women’s Audio Archive.
Susan Bee
New York artist Susan Bee defends the political and subversive potential that develops when art and pleasure unite. Which is why imagination, poetry, humour, subjectivity, textures, colours, lines, and matter play an essential role in her work, both in her collages and paintings and her artist’s books. As an art student in the late sixties, she first came in contact with feminist activism and other social movements such as black power, gay rights, and protests against the Vietnam War. In 1986, she embarked on the project M/E/A/N/I/N/G, a self-managed art magazine that she co-edited with fellow artist Mira Schor for thirty years. In this podcast, Susan also shares the particularities of being a woman and an artist who has passed the age threshold of 65 in New York’s artistic ecosystem today.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with New York artist and editor Susan Bee that we were unable to include the first time around.
Antye Greie (AGF)
Antye Greie (aka AGF or poemproducer) is a poet, activist, sound artist, sound sculptor, and curator, born in East Germany and based on the island of Hailuoto in northern Finland for over fifteen years. In this podcast, we talk to Antye Greie about language, sound, and the body. At their intersection, the voice emerges, with its multiple resonances and different ways of introducing the voice of others through her own practice and space of visibility. Along the way, we look at her work and methodology, from the deconstruction of texts to the implementation of what she calls “feminist sonic technologies”.
Grant Watson
We sat down with curator and researcher Grant Watson to talk about textiles and their material and social ramifications. Instead, we ended up talking about his interview-based practice, essentially producing an extremely meta interview on interviews and interviewing. In this podcast, Grant talks about enacting, editing, demographics, transference, capturing the atmosphere of an interview, and other issues that he explores in one of his main ongoing projects, How We Behave.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Martha Rosler that we were unable to include the first time around.
Laura Mulvey
Laura Mulvey contextualises, updates, and elucidates on the far-reaching impact of her key text "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", where she coined the notion of the “male gaze” in classic Hollywood cinema and addressed the power asymmetry in representation and assigned gender roles, thus emphasising the patriarchal ideological agenda of the American film industry. At the same time, she opens up the debate with the notions of the “queer gaze” and the “universal whiteness” of Hollywood. Mulvey also defends orality as a form of "history from below", citing the example of “compilation films” (films that use archival footage re-written with new narrative) as a space for a new feminist film practice.
Martha Rosler
Martha Rosler analyses and questions the proliferation of surveillance systems and self-representations in contemporary society, while telling us about artistic circles in the seventies, the seminal video art scene, and the need to keep chasing utopias.
Manuel J. Borja-Villel and Bartomeu Marí about "Nancy Spero. Dissidances"
Manuel J. Borja-Villel and Bartomeu Marí talk about the exhibition "Nancy Spero. Dissidances."