In Their Own Words: Disseminating Feminist Self-Art Histories in Sound Archives

Abstract

In 2009, artist Marysia Lewandowska began digitizing and sharing the Women Audio Archive (WAA) online. Begun in 1983 and conducted until the early 1990s, the WAA is a sound archive containing around 120 hours of public and private conversations recorded by the artist between London, the United States, and Canada with a Sony Walkman WM‑F1 cassette player. The WAA embodies the trajectory of feminist interview and oral history practices of the 1970s in an exemplary way, deliberately exploiting the potential of analog recording technology to capture traditionally marginalized voices of art and social history. Considering the obsolescence of recording technologies and dissemination channels, this paper interrogates the historical forms of accessibility to feminist art practices of self‑historicization and calls for reflection on the shift that the digitization of these sound documents entails. Particular attention will be given to the historical negotiations of intellectual co‑ownership and the contemporary contexts in which private analogue sound archives can become public and open source following their digitization.