Andrea Zarza

Andrea Zarza Canova is a curator, archivist and AHRC-funded PhD researcher based in London whose work connects sound archives with their political, social, and cultural dimensions through exhibitions, radio, text and audio publications. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham in collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary, where she recently curated the exhibition and live programme Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen.

Andrea has given talks, listening sessions, and curated exhibitions internationally at places like CentroCentro, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Southbank Centre, Stanley Picker Gallery, nGbK, TBA21, Somserset House, Sandberg Institute, Pirelli HangarBicocca, NTS Radio and Relativa Radio. Andrea works as a curator at the British Library' sound archive. She ran record label Mana with Matthew Kent from 2017 to 2023 and now runs traza.

Get in touch — ¡Escríbeme!

RECENT WORK

Sonic Time Capsule

Instruction manual for making a sonic stime capsule. Written in London in 2012 and used at a workshop organised by Seismograph and The Lake Radio in 2017, Copenhagen, Denmark.

This document attempts to lay out a path towards the creation of a sonic time capsule. It can be read like a map, a score, or an instruction manual. It is a prototype for action, and hopefully, through time, it will grow and multiply with the experiences of others.

British Library

We document, preserve and make accessible one of the world's largest collections of published and unpublished recordings of music from all over the world dating back to as early as the 19th century. The collection represents commercial and ethnographic archival recordings variously described as traditional, folk and ‘world music’.

Andrea Zarza Canova

Curator, World and Traditional Music

https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/world-and-traditional-music

@BL_WorldTrad

Listen to Sounds!

+44 (0)20 7412 7455

Highlighted Projects

✶ Percy Grainger's collection of ethnographic wax cylinders

The British Library is pleased to make available online around 350 English folk songs recorded by composer Percy Grainger in different regions of England between 1906 and 1909. (...)

✶ Embedded Live

Since autumn 2015, the British Library Sound Archive has hosted Aleks Kolkowski and Larry Achiampong as composers in residence through Sound and Music's Embedded Residency scheme. (...)

✶ British Library Sound Archive 10 chart for WIRE Magazine.

View

✶ World Day for Audiovisual Heritage

27 October is World Day for Audiovisual Heritage. UNESCO designated this day to highlight the work of archives worldwide in preserving and making accessible their unique audiovisual collections that are at risk of decay. (...)

✶ Five European Villages

To celebrate World Listening Day, the World and Traditional Music section has made available to listeners in British Library Reading Rooms, a collection of field recordings from five European villages, which form part of the World Soundscape Project Collection. (...)

The London Musicians’ Collective (LMC) was founded in the mid-1970’s by a small group of experimental and improvising musicians in London, United Kingdom. In tune with the nature of improvisation and the cultural politics of the time, the organisation was based on collective principles, with an open membership whose responsibility it was to decide policy and initiate activities through attendance at monthly meetings.

The London Musicians’ Collective Archive is currently housed at the University of the Arts London Archives and Special Collections Centre. Posters, newsletters, calendars and photographs illustrate the activities and evolution of the LMC over the three decades of its existence. Since 2012, I have been working with the archive intermittently, cataloguing and making accessible its contents.

In 2017, David Toop and I interviewed founding members of the collective about its history and added this material to the archive.

Co-curated with José Luis Espejo, Charivaria was an exhibition that took place between October 2017 and January 2018, at CentroCentro Gallery in Madrid, Spain.

Through more than 200 mixed media works from over ninety contributors, the exhibition traced hypothetical genealogies on how people use sound to position themselves in public space. The exhibition focussed on Europe from the early Modern Age to the present day and told stories of blacksmiths, church bells, cowbells, festivals, skimmington, protests, travelling musicians and carnivals and rites.

Exhibition Page

Selected Press & Radio:

La Casa del Sonido, Radio 2

Desde CentroCentro, M21

No Play Listening Lounge

The No Play exhibition took place from 21 May to 24 June 2016 at the neue Gesellschaft fur bildende (nGbK) Kunst in Berlin, Germany.

Co-curated with Miranda Iossifidis, the No Play Listening Lounge expanded the overarching themes of the exhibition and its event programme through field recordings, interviews, oral histories and contemporary music sourced from the British Library Sound Archive, Pacifica Radio Archives and others. Five headphone sets were built into a playful physical structure allowing the listener to spend time listening to this sonic resource.

Read the listening lounge notes.

Read a press review in Taz.

Meltdown Listening Lounge

David Byrne’s Meltdown Festival took place in August 2015 at the Southbank Centre in London, United Kingdom.

As part of Meltdown Festival, Byrne shipped 250 books from his personal collection – those that had most shaped his thinking and approach to music – to the Southbank’s Poetry Library. Throughout the festival, you could borrow these books for free.

The Meltdown Listening Lounge took eight books from his library as inspiration for eight headphone sets featuring playlists of archival sound recordings from the British Library Sound Archive.

Read notes about the sound recordings here.

Miscellaneous

✶ Los Caballos de Düsseldorf Two Day Residency at Cafe OTO

Curated by Andrea Zarza, 24 and 25 May 2015.

All In A Day's Work

All in a Day’s Work, a listening lounge curated by Andrea Zarza at Rhubaba Gallery (27 July – August 18, 2018), invites visitors to engage with curated playlists of archival and contemporary sound recordings that explore ‘labours of love’, such as artistic, affective and domestic labour.

Organised into five different sub-themes – All four(s), Stooping, Hands on the Machine, Cradling and Lying down, Looking up – the visitors are invited to take a specific position to listen, a position associated with the labours described in each sub-theme. This embodied listening asks one to put themselves in the position of the other to to achieve a more empathetic connection with the voices and songs in the recordings.

All four(s) relates to ‘labours of love’ implicit within the structure of the nuclear family, typically associated with the number four – the mother, the father, and two children; Cradling finds its focus in lullabies, the work song of female affective and emotional labour; Stooping explores women’s roles in labour; in Hands on the Machine, sound recordings reveal the relationship between women and skilled, machine-led labour: from waulking cloth to computer music; finally, Lying down, Looking up invites the listener to pause and look up into the open possibilities of different futures.

Exhibition Page