ISSUE #26 In Their Own Words

Introduction

This feature reports on research carried out during the 2023-2024 academic year thanks to the Gendered Innovation Fund that we obtained in 2023 for the In Their Own Words research project. Our aim was to formalise a long-term thinking process that had already been partially developed in other forms and in other contexts. A few years earlier, we had initiated the collection of artists’ interviews On Words, which Sarah Burkhalter subsequently joined when the project found a home at the Swiss Institute for the Study of Art (SIK-ISEA). While the theoretical research developed upstream already addressed the concerns of women artists’ conversations, this time On Words laid the foundations for an empirical creation, based on the principle of listening, horizontal exchange, and unfinalised speech.

For the In Their Own Words research project, we delved into the feminist practice of artist conversation, tracing its occurrences from the birth of the tape recorder to the podcast. The initial assumption was that feminist artists and art historians had imagined new forms of experimental writing and documentation through conversational practices. This practice, which is also part of our work as art educators, is deeply rooted in the radical encounter between activism and research. In order to share intersectional reflections on unrecorded art histories, we have summoned artistic and theoretical approaches, both speculative and historical, around these questions. To grasp the questions themselves, we are drawing on feminist, queer, and decolonial thinking.

Including feminist talking narratives into the wider art narrative requires the development of specific methods of analysis. This involved taking into account the media used to record and share conversations; the archiving processes involved in storing these conversations and making them available to the public; and the obsolescence of the media and channels used to access these conversations in historical analogue and, now, online digital, archives.

With this in mind, we looked at the influence of the tape recorder’s playback function on memory, the affective forces revealed by the archiving of otherwise inaudible voices, and at how to address concerns about the legitimacy of the personal and political information gathered from these conversational archives.

In the course of the research, the boundaries of the notion of internationality were challenged from an intersectional perspective. While the corpus of US and European feminist interviews we first analysed remains largely invisible in canonical art history, a further invisibility weighed on the essential work carried out by artists Helen Khal in Lebanon and Nazli Madkour in Egypt, who, along with Cindy Nemser and Eleanor Munro, share our interest. These methodological, aesthetic and art historical perspectives are complemented by the contribution of Olivia Alexandra Fahmy, a researcher associated with our project, on artist Nazli Madkour’s publication, Women Artists in Egypt.

The In Their Own Words feature reports on the various stages of our research. In addition to the above-mentioned article by Olivia Alexandra Fahmy, this feature describes the methodological issues that were addressed (“On the record: Notes on Feminist Practices of Visual Arts Interviewing”); it makes it possible to view the contributions at the study day organised in March 2024; and, finally, a podcast based on a conversation with the Polish-born London-based artist Marysia Lewandowska traces a career and a path shaped by conversations with women artists: the Women’s Audio Archive. In the 2000s, self-produced, specialised or general podcasts offered a flexible form of listening and accessible discursivity. Over the last ten years or so, they have given rise to a new wave of feminist projects aimed at rediscovering the voices absent from official narratives. The podcast’s intimate distribution format has enabled us to question its potential for self-learning. How do audiences, particularly generation Z and the youngest listeners, engage with art history podcasts? What are the contexts of reception of this history – and how does intimate listening enable a different experience of content assimilation?

Enjoy!

Julie Enckell and Federica Martini

Content

On the Record: Notes on Feminist Practices of Visual Arts Interviewing

In this essay, the two authors discuss feminist methodologies of the visual arts interview. Adopting the interview to obtain information on women’s experience of art means focusing research on the terms of conversation and language. From this approach comes a critical reflection on the dimension of exclusion in the vocabulary used, which does not have the same meaning depending on who is speaking. If the interview belongs to the category of artists’ writings for criticism and the history of contemporary art, the feminist approach places more emphasis on the voice and the act of talking.

Federica Martini

Julie Enckell Julliard

Portrait of Marysia Lewandowska by Colin Fournier

In Her Own Words

The podcast captures the essence of a conversation that we had with Polish-born artist Marysia Lewandowska in November 2023, at her studio in London. This conversation is the starting point and matrix of the research project In Their Own Words. While tracing her trajectory as an artist from the Eastern Bloc to capitalist England, Marysia Lewandowska discusses how her use of the audio recorder allowed her to connect with the Western art world. From this experience was born her “self-instituted” project, the Women’s Audio Archive, an archive of over 120 hours of recordings that has now been digitized. What is the role of an artist’s conversation and what status does art history give it? How should it be disseminated? Should it be archived? Should it be edited and, if so, to what extent? This podcast brings together the essential methodological questions raised by this discussion conducted from a feminist perspective.

Federica Martini

Julie Enckell Julliard

The exception that proves the rule? Nazli Madkour, Nawal El Saadawi and “Women and Art in Egypt”

In the late 1980s, because they knew and trusted each other, Nazli Madkour, an Egyptian artist active in the cultural scene, and Nawal El Saadawi, a psychiatrist, writer and feminist political activist, agreed to publish a book that revisited and shed light on the role of women artists in Egypt. The book was published in 1989 under the title Egyptian Women and Artistic Creativity [المرأة المصريةوالإبداع الفني]. In 1991, the Egyptian government’s State Information Service commissioned an English edition, entitled Women and Art in Egypt. In an interview with Olivia Alexandra Fahmy, Nazli Madkour looks back on the history of these two books.

Olivia Alexandra Fahmy

Voicing the Archive

What is the burden of the archive if not memory itself? Can we move on from thinking of archives as stores of data, and closer to an idea of a desiring archive, a reservoir of affective materials and resistant opacities? In establishing the Women’s Audio Archive in London (1985-1991) I had in mind both the collection and a site where the recorded conversations would participate in developing a history of women in the media-visual tradition, which by its ephemeral nature can easily be forgotten. The Archive with its attention to sound acted as an incision in the hegemony of visuality and adjacent commodity values of the 1980s.

Marysia Lewandowska

Of Queer Resonance

In the foreword of her collection of tape-recorded interviews Autoritratto (1969) Carla Lonzi challenged her readers with the question: “If it had been possible to record what the artists used to say in their everyday conversations, would we still need to read Vasari’s Lives to find a contact with them?” Conjuring a technological anachronism, Lonzi exposed the very capacity of sound recording to redefine the separation between history and experience. Following her cue, in this paper Francesco Ventrella draws from a series of artist interviews, talking pictures, and other acoustic scenarios to explore how resonance can help us rethink the limits of representation in the discourse of art history.

Francesco Ventrella

“Les parleuses”: Conversations on Art in Italy in the 1960s-1970s

In Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, Carla Lonzi and Anne Marie Sauzeau Boetti, both engaged in the feminist movement, proposed thinking about art through dialogue between artists and generations of artists, beyond established aesthetic categories and groups. They challenged the verticality of genealogies in art history, which were organized in a succession of artistic movements and great artists, in a conception that left aside the ideology of the masterpiece and the creative genius. Drawing on examples from the Italian context, this lecture offers a reflection on the epistemic and political stakes of an art writing based on relationship, dialogue, and listening.

Giovanna Zapperi

Two Auditionary Prophetesses Facing Scholars: Hildegard of Bingen and Elise Müller

What is the power of a woman who hears voices in the face of artistic and political authorities? The Rhenish abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was a visionary and “auditionary” prophetess. Her music is still sung, and her voice translated into all languages, even in the feminist journal Heresies. She conveyed a message from another dimension, attested by male authorities (abbots and a pope). The Geneva medium Elise Müller (1861-1929), known by the heteronym Hélène Smith, also had visions and heard voices that dictated her drawings and paintings of Mars, Ultra-Mars, and the Holy Land. She conveyed messages she did not claim authorship of, controlled and doubted by multiple male authorities. These two anachronistic artists, separated by eight centuries, transmitted their voices in the interstices of male control and the definitions of art and vision.

Clovis Maillet

Art History and Activism: Why Sound Creation?

Why use a sound medium to talk about images? What social role can a podcast play? To what extent is it a relatively free and safe space for conveying an engaged discourse? How can we preserve and enhance sound archives? Without claiming to provide definitive solutions to these complex issues, this talk will offer some answers and avenues for reflection.

Julie Beauzac

ANOL1: The First Encounter

ANOL1: The First Encounter is the first 3D animation of the ANOL1 series that explores the rich tapestry of female mythical creatures from Central Asia, shedding light on their untold stories in a decolonial context. Drawing upon the concept of female monstrosity, the animation aims to underline the intergenerational connections and empower future generations with forgotten narratives.

Sara Bissen