Sonic Librarian. Wikipedia Editor. Researcher
Jess Rowley is a sonic librarian who explores decolonial approaches to archiving and editing.
Driven by a deep fascination with missing ephemera she develops visual archives, metadata and cataloguing processes as tools to combat cultural amnesia.
Her project brothers aims to revive the lost phonograph recordings of James and George Bohee through performance activations. The duo is thought to be among the first Black musicians to record music onto a wax cylinder circa 1890. She is also the founder of the Ghost Edit Group, part of the Decolonising Wikipedia Network, a community of researchers and artists reworking and uploading biographies of underrepresented sound practitioners. Previously a cataloguer and library assistant at the Feminist Library, she is an educator and researcher collaborating with institutions including Central Saint Martins and the Architectural Association.
Mesh Festival — London Design Festival —Sounding: the collective presents... — Cubitt Gallery: sounding the archive — Pororoca: Embrace the River and Sea — Studio Chapple x Metro54 — Feminist Library — South London Gallery — Brand New Life Journal — Museum of the Home — Willie Gallery — BASE Milano — Lethaby Gallery — Jumbi — The Koppel Project — SET Space — Architectural Association