“Yours truly, William Louis Sørensen”: A ghost story about a sound archive from the crypts beneath SMK, National Gallery of Denmark

Recorded voices make up the majority of materials in the sound archive at SMK, National Gallery of Denmark. Collected by artist William Louis Sørensen (1942-2005) in 1991-92, the archive has subsequently been lingering in storage for decades. This audio paper speaks to the ghosts that haunt the sound archive – the people and circumstances that whisper from the margins about how it came to be.

No formal definition exists of what William was supposed to collect – in comments from the margins he speaks of "THE SOUND". His position contains a haunting paradox: granted archontic power (Derrida 1996) to name and collect sounds in relation to art – yet hired through a job activation programme, himself as marginal within the museum as the archive he built. His ubiquitous presence saturates the narrative of the archive, prompting resistance: "You are talking so much – and it feels so weird," one voice objects.

One recording in particular offers a clue: in a radio programme made by artist Kirsten Justesen in 1975, art historian Hellen Lassen describes her own method – "it becomes the art historian's task to find out what the silenced material is." From this I develop "institutional listening": a critical concept for how the museum hears – and fails to hear – the practices it classifies as marginal, as Other (Derrida 1980; Spivak 1993). Its sharpest formulation comes from the archive itself, in artist Eric Andersen's words: we "lay our ear over the sound and cover it up" (Andersen 1991). The paper concludes by asking: Can the Museum hear?