At the Amsterdam workshop, we spoke about decolonial possibilities of sound epistemologies in history in the very boardroom of the Dutch East Indies company (where many economic and political decisions about colonial Indonesia were made!). Talk about reinscribing colonial history!On tour of the Sound Technology Collection of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision where we saw and listened to historical sound players, recorders, players, and recordings.Visiting the Jaap Kunst Collection at the University of Amsterdam- Bijzondere Collecties, a part of the bigger Jaap Kunst archive that Barbara Titus curates.
Last month, I had the privilege to have talked, collaborated, and traveled with archivists, historians, and scholars working on sound histories of Southeast Asia. The group discussed sonic understandings, materialities of sounds, and listening as a community at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and at the University of Amsterdam. Some of us travelled further to visit the different archives in Hilversum, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Vienna. We reanimated spirits in Southeast Asian voice recordings from a century ago stored in repositories around Europe. I’m very lucky to have Barbara Titus to have crazily agreed to co-convene this nine-day/four-city workshop/conference/archival tour project. We are deeply thankful to all the participants (some of whom travelled across oceans) for generously sharing their time, thoughts, and reflections to dis/entangle sonic histories.
Here we are visiting the Southeast Asian collection of the instrumentarium of the Ethnomusicology wing of the Berlin Ethnologisches Museum. We are lucky to have caught these objects before they are wrapped for the big move to the Humboldt Forum.Here’s a group photo of the Berlin team together with Albrecht Wiedmann, director of the Berlin Phonogram Archive.
During our Sonic Entanglements panel at the EuroSEAS Conference, we invited the participants in a round table format and we placed the materiality of sound at the center of our discussion. Overlooking our room is the iconic Berlin TV tower, and Berlin cathedral.The Sonic Entanglements team at the EuroSEAS Conference at Humboldt University of Berlin.
We are excited about our plans to have some of our workshop papers published, and we are thinking about aural ways of sharing our conversations and journeys. We also plan to get together again next summer. We will keep you posted about these upcoming news. You can read more about our workshops and tour at http://sonic-entanglements.com/workshops2019
The gang cramped together in the sound studio of the Vienna Phonogram Archive observing the institute’s technical director, Nadja Wallaskovits performing a sound digitization process.In the last destination of our tour at the Phonogram Archive of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, together with the newly appointed director Kerstin Klenke and archivist Gerda Lechleitner.
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