hernoise.org

HerNoise.org

The Her Noise project was initiated by Lina Džuverović and Anne Hilde Neset in 2001 in the UK with an ambition to investigate music and sound histories in relation to gender, and to create a lasting resource in this area through building up an archive. In 2005 Lina and Anne co-curated Her Noise, an exhibition building on their research, which took place at South London Gallery, Tate Modern and Goethe Institut and gathered international artists who use sound to investigate social relations, inspire action or uncover hidden soundscapes.  The exhibition included newly commissioned works by Kim Gordon & Jutta Koether, Emma Hedditch, Christina Kubisch, Kaffe Matthews, Hayley Newman and Marina Rosenfeld, as well as a series of talks and performances.

I first got involved with the Her Noise Project and Archive in 2010. This happened through an internship where I was tasked to catalogue the project and facilitate its donation from Electra, a small arts organisation in London, to the University of the Arts London, under the auspices of CRiSAP.

What initially drew me to this archive was that my previous educational experiences in sonic arts and experimental musics, not only almost exclusively drew upon curriculum dominated by white Euro/American men, but also was one in which I experienced sexism and bias on a daily basis (racism and trans/homophobia were not even terms that could even begin to be addressed in my academic experiences in early 2000’s in the UK). In cataloguing the project and archive it became apparent that many of the audiovisual artefacts were in a state of disrepair, so I offered also to repair, restore, re-edit and digitise a lot of the material. I did this for two reasons, one, I wanted to access the material within and two, I thought it important that others should also be able to access the sonic lives and worlds of the people who made up both this project and archive.

In early discussions about Her Noise, as I understood it, the curators seemed to be worn out by the demands of the project, which took five years to produce and by the time I got involved, had demanded another five years of un/underfunded upkeep. The production and maintenance of the project had seemingly demanded a lot from the lives of the curators, as all work that seeks to challenge a status quo does.

In working between Electra and CRiSAP, my understanding, gleaned from numerous conversations and meetings, was that this archive was never meant to represent a definitive history of women in sound, but rather it offered a starting point and would continue to grow, to be added to, to be a living archive. Whilst this still seemed to be a common agreement, I was tasked with creating new interviews and in collaboration with members of CRiSAP and Electra, I built www.hernoise.org

An exhibition titled Slow Runner: Her Noise Archive II was held in Karlsruhe, Germany, the Her Noise: Feminisms and the Sonic symposium took place at London’s Tate Modern and the Vocal Folds Symposium, inspired by the Her Noise Archive, took place in Oslo, Norway. We also began using the archive as a teaching resource. We were all doing a lot of work off the back of this project, in my case often as a labour of love, to try to animate discussions about gender and sound within our orbits.

I was aware of the whiteness of the project, even though one of its main curators, similarly to myself, comes from a mixed background. One of the early ways I hoped to address this was to try to set up a meeting between the Lambeth Women’s Project, who also had an archive of artefacts in which there was a lot of crossover with the Her Noise Project, and Electra and CRiSAP. Sadly, this generous offer to really expand the archive, to enact the late Stuart Hall’s expansive definition of a living archive, was turned down. I regret this missed opportunity to have been able to open the space to  discussions about gender and race which not only would have benefited the University of the Arts London, but also which were so urgently needed amongst the student body and staff.

Her Noise Archive Guest Curators

Hernoise.org was launched in 2012. One way in which we initially sought to activate the archive was to invite guest curators to respond to the archive and to select:

  • an item from the archive
  • an artist they would like to see interviewed
  • a book to add to the bibliography
  • an item to add to the archive

Hernoise.org guest curators include:

  • Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski
  • Lisa Busby
  • Maximilian Spiegel
  • AGF
  • Andra McCartney
  • Fender Schrade
  • Greta Pistaceci
  • Jenny Graf Sheppard
  • Ain Bailey
  • Tara Rodgers

Re-launched in 2021, hernoise.org receives a freshly redesigned and accessible update of the site, as a link to the recent past for the next generation of riot grrrls, rebel dykes and rabble-rousers.