Towards a meta-archive: Working with colonial sound recordings in the postcolonial era
Friday 7 March 2025, 12pm
Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre
Britta Lange (Humboldt University, Berlin)
Between 1915 and 1918, the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission produced 1.650 wax discs with speech and music samples in German prisoner of war camps kept today in in the Berlin Sound Archive (https://www.lautarchiv.hu-berlin.de/). The digitization of the recordings, completed in 2006, has been the precondition for several scientific and artistic research projects on the POW sound files – as they can be listened to again. My work with the samples of selected speakers asks not only for their voices, their biographies and their messages, but also reflects on the act of listening to them and the possibilities of making acts of listening audible. It questions possibilities of coping with the sounding legacies of the colonial era in postcolonial constellations and thinks about enriching the colonial archive with these reflections.
Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Hilary Term 2025
Fridays, 12pm-1.30pm (Weeks 1-8)
In person at the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre.
