A voice in-between: the Women's Audio Archive Marysia Lewandowska artist/archivist/collector of missing texts

Abstract

This article looks at Marysia Lewandowska's Women's Audio Archive (WAA) considering it as an important feminist precursor to a more widespread interest in archives throughout the visual arts. Framing the discussion on this pivotal example of an artist's alternative archival practice is a consideration of a paradigm shift in archival theory. Picking up on Terry Cook's drawing together of postmodernism and archive theory, the article looks specifically at Victoria Worsley's diagrammatic description of the ‘in-between space’ of the archive to draw a link through time between Worsley's conception of the ‘New Model Arkive’ and Lewandowska's recorded collection. Worsley describes a living archive as a subjective territory encompassing feelings, emotions and the irrational chaos of life. In relation to this, I argue that Lewandowska performs uncertainty through the archive taking up the double position of guest and host in a foreign culture. From this ambiguous position, Lewandowska struggles with questions of public and private, power and disempowerment, presence and absence and displacement through language to negotiate a creative praxis. The argument contains a detailed exploration of voice as the primary medium for WAA, using Mladen Dolar's analysis of its particular ambiguities as a medium to relate back to the in-between status of the archive as Worsley conceives it. Finally, in relation to the conditions of our current knowledge economy, the article asks if a consideration of WAA could contribute to new imaginings of the archive as a moving and hospitable place.