I’m a writer, curator and historian and the director of the Alternative Toronto digital community archive project. My work explores the cultures and textures of cities, with a focus on sound, space and social movements.
As a community archivist, I use digital tools to intervene in established historical narratives, curating images, sounds and texts to tell stories about people and communities that remain in the margins of existing accounts. I’m also committed to building autonomous memory infrastructures that enable them to tell their own.
I’m currently based at the Lakeshore Village Artists’ Co-op in New Toronto and work at the Media Arts Network of Ontario.
Email: lilian [dot] radovac [at] gmail [dot] com
Twitter: @lilianradovac
Instagram: @lilian.radovac
Mastodon: https://mstdn.ca/@lrad
Cover photo: Lea Grahovac
RESEARCH
My book project investigates the architects and historical targets of New York’s noise ordinance, or what the Citizens for a Quieter City called the "noise makers" and “noise victims” of the city. Funded by a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship and based on several years of archival research, Muting Dissent uses sound to explore how fears about interwar radicalism, the urban crisis, and Black and Latinx resistance movements merged with dominant city planning discourses to constrain the use of public space by residents. The result is an aural counter-history that places race, class, ethnicity and gender at the centre of modern urban life, and creates a framework for understanding how contemporary sound technologies and their regulatory regimes are still permeated by echoes of the past.
PUBLICATIONS
“Food First, Then Archives: Precarity and Community Memory.” With Simon Vickers. Active History, July 7, 2021.
“Re/mediating the Archive: Building Alternative Toronto.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 32:1 (Winter 2018): 97-110.
“Muting Dissent: New York City’s Sound Device Ordinance and the Liberalization of the Public Sphere.” Radical History Review 121 (January 2015): 32-50.
“À qui la rue?: On Mégaphone and Montreal’s Noisy Public Sphere.” Sounding Out! February 24, 2014.
“Mic Check: Occupy Wall Street and the Space of Audition.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 11:1 (January 2014): 34-41.
“Agitato.” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 28 (Fall 2012): 223-224.
“The ‘War on Noise’: Sound and Space in La Guardia’s New York.” American Quarterly 63:3 (September 2011): 733-760.
Reprinted in: Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies. Eds. Kara Keeling and Josh Kun, 289-316. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.
DIGITAL
PROJECTS
A.C.T. for Disarmament benefit
Apocalypse Club, 1991