Sound Draws Us Together: Irene Revell and Sarah Shin in Conversation with Klara du Plessis

Irene Revell is a researcher and curator, lecturing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Co-Leading the Scoring Warnings AHRC research project at CRiSAP,University of the Arts London. Sarah Shin is one of the co-founders of Silver Press, a feminist publishing venture also based in London, U.K., featuring international authors and artists, as well as a wide array of hybrid approaches to book-making. Together, Revell and Shin co-edited an expansive collection of over fifty contributions centring feminist sonic cultures and radical listening practices, Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear (Silver Press, 2024). These contributions span a wide range of materials, letters, excerpts, poems, philosophical provocations, listening exercises, performance documentation, and much more, intersecting with an intellectual or scholarly mindset without feeling institutionally discernible or bound. The versatility of the materials compiled here generate a sense of liveness, a feeling of sound enacting itself rather than being reified into a representation of itself. Or as Shin suggests, “Sound can be displayed (without making it static) by making it felt.” Klara du Plessis talks to Revell and Shin about their project of creating an affective space where sound can resonate thematically, but also as physical bodies of sound in conceptual allusion to its own status as signal. Simultaneously, the wide variety of contributions harmonise to produce a collective community space in the pages of the book. After all, as Revell notes, “it is sound that draws us together into relation.”