From Sounding Board to Service Counter
- 's-Hertogenbosch (NL)
- March 2026 — October 2026
- In collaboration with BHICCharles W. Manders Fellowship
On 15 October 2026 I concluded my Charles W. Manders Fellowship at BHIC, the Brabant historical archive, with the performative lecture Van Klankkast tot Loket (From Sounding Board to Service Counter). For half a year I delved into the archives of the second feminist wave in Brabant, looking for the ways women dealt with violence against women between the 1970s and the 1990s.
I searched the minutes of women’s groups, read the women’s newspapers that still exist and listened to recordings of the Vrouwenradio (women’s radio) in Den Bosch and of Radio Vrij Den Bosch. From those broadcasts I made sound compositions. I brought them together with animations in a single continuous line, drawn after photographs from the same archives.
The sounding board stands for what women organised themselves in the 1970s and 1980s: women’s cafés, shelters, telephone lines, courses. The service counter stands for where much of that has ended up today. Below, the lecture is presented in parts: the poem, the animations with sound from the radio archives, fragments from my research diary and a new archive that the audience filled themselves.
Concept, text, animations and sound compositions: Roosje Verschoor. Made within the Charles W. Manders Fellowship of BHIC, which centres on the audiovisual collection. Photography: Joris Vens.
