Inspired by Voskuil's humiliating series of novels Het Bureau about the Meertens Institute, and by the two-person typewriter located there, Isabelle Sully developed a research plan into the language of administration. “The project will work with the difference between written and spoken language when it comes to characterizing administrative work as creative work, essentially seeking to find a poetic language of expression within the rigidity of administrative communication.” Within the administration there is a long history of anonymous, mostly female, writers sitting behind typewriters day after day. It is their tracks that Sully wants to trace: “How can administrative work be an artistic work with room for expression? How can administration be designed as a collective creation?” For the answers, Sully wanted to delve into the archives at the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam and the collection of the Telecom Museum in Rotterdam, to examine the technologies that contributed to the mediation and distribution of the spoken word. A book and film were her ultimate goal.

Sully studied in Melbourne and Glasgow and graduated cum laude from the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem in 2017. From 2017 to 2020 she was editor-in-chief at Publication Studio Rotterdam and she founded Unbidden Tongues. She writes for Metropolis M, among others, is an assistant curator at Kunstverein Amsterdam and exhibits her work in the form of site-specific installations, publications and curatorial projects. The R&D Committee enjoyed reading her in-depth and suggestive application and found the relationship between art and work very interesting.

When the Meertens Institute was closed for lockdown in 2020, Sully decided to continue her research remotely by expanding the scope of the targeted archives. She delved into the archives of the Women's Electoral Lobby - a Melbourne-based feminist political organization - and feminist research, as well as the nursing records of the Melbourne Women's Hospital. She published an essay in Metropolis M using the two-person typewriter at the Meertens Institute as a source of inspiration, linking to the Australian archives and the relationship between human administration and communication machines. She published a book on these nursing records. With locations closed, she turned the filming plan into a switchboard radio play — traditionally run by women — featuring fictitious depictions of figures from the archives. She hopes to be able to display this site-specific in the Telecom Museum when it reopens. She also produced a book of script-based works, Personal Appointments, which maps the network of female workers to "create a trail of the lives already given to work, fictional and factual." She and designer Robert Milne found a typography with room for expression and intonation, enriching the book with personal additions, for a book form that she wants to use more often as an instrument and whose scripts can be performed by whoever wants.