Politics of listening (and imagination) of the otherness through sound archives

GARCÍA, MIGUEL ANGEL

Delmenhorst

Workshop; International Scientific Workshop: Sounds Different -Postcolonial Perspectives on Aurality and the Politics of Listening; 2023

Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg

In the last few years, I have been wondering how the archive generates particular conditions for recording, searching and even for editing. I have tried to answer this question based on my work with wax cylinder collections hosted in the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv and with sound recordings stored in the National Institute of Musicology Carlos Vega in Argentina. On this occasion, I am going to retake some of those ideas and to focus on how the archive also creates conditions for listening to the otherness. That means that I am going to talk about the politics of listening and, since the questions about sound and listening are always matters of meaning, I am also going to address my attention to elucidate how the senses of sound recordings change in accordance with not only the listening conditions which the archive creates but also with theoretical and other variables. The main concepts of my presentation, although not the only ones, will be “the otherness” and “the archive”. Regarding the concept of “the otherness”, I am going to take its most common definition: an imaginary construction of non-European people made by researchers educated in a European frame. The concept of “archive” is more complex to outline because it has become extremely polysemic and metaphorical in the last three decades. Nowadays, the word “archive” refers to an institution, a building that stores documents, knowledge, a place where to analyse the construction of knowledge, the life drive (in Derrida´s terms), a place for memory, a place where the past is kept, the Web, and many other phenomena. But in this presentation, I am not going to resort any of them but to approach the archive as a condition, stressing its power for conditioning or even determining the creation of sound recordings. From these questions and conceptual framework, I am going to discuss how we listen to the otherness through sound recordings created mostly under colonialist regimes and stored in archival environments.