Radio as Social Sculpture: Clippings with Isabelle Sully, hosted by Inga Charlotte Thiele

I contacted Isabelle already a bit over a year ago. Having followed her various projects for a while, I wanted to include the Unbidden Tongues publications in my book shop in Vienna. After we had been in touch via email, I felt like I wanted to get to know her and her work more closely. I read on her website that she studied in Naarm/Melbourne and was born in Australia, which created a connection to our RASS Australia edition.

I’m very excited to now present to you what Isabelle 'handed' to me, which is a collection of various materials of writings and recordings. Through her web of texts, videos and recordings that she sent me, she invited me to learn about the Australian Women’s Liberation Movement, which was closely tied to the Labour Movement in 1970s Australia.

An important pillar of our conversations and for the the program is Zelda D’Aprano, who was born in 1928 and died in 2018. She was a feminist activist living in Melbourne and was a key figure in the struggle for equal pay. In a Guardian article from 2018, Leena van Deventer writes about Zelda: I feel lucky for every conversation we had together. Each time I walked away feeling like I could do anything, and she utilised those powers very skilfully. She told me to ask for more from the world, even if I wanted the sun. So, to honour my friend: I’ll have your moon too, thanks.

Alongside short recordings about Zelda D’Aprano’s life and activism, the materials speak about the mechanics and labour of language and expression—and, with the media connection, amplifying voices and being heard.

Isabelle Sully practices across art-making, curating, editing and writing. Working with feminist histories in mind, she takes the mechanisms and materiality of administration as the main focus within her work, developing conceptual projects that span experimental writing, sculpture, performance, exhibition-making and publishing. She lives in Rotterdam where she is the the founding editor of Unbidden Tounges, a series of publications which publishes previously produced yet relatively uncirculated work by cultural practitioners. A focus lies on questions around civility and civid life–particularly in relation to language and its administration. Isabelle is moreover the co-editor of Tangents, an English-language online review platform focused on writing about the Dutch art scene and co-curator of Playbill, an event-based project curated with Martha Jaeger which is invested in the presentation of experimental language and text-based artistic works. In addition to all these immensely interesting activities, she is also the new artistic director of A Tale of A Tub in Rotterdam.

Inga Charlotte Thiele is a writer, curator and book seller based in Vienna. She runs Prosopopoeia, a book shop, exhibition space and host focussing on writing and text in the context of artistic practices. Prosopopoeia (Greek προσωποποιία; prosōpopoiía) is a rhetorical device in which a speaker or writer communicates to an audience by speaking as another person or object.