Restituting, Reconnecting, Reimagining Sound Heritage

Researchers, archivists and museum curators in former colonial metropoles (notably in Western Europe and North America) have become increasingly aware of issues of provenance concerning objects from formerly colonial frontiers that have – for centuries – been assembled, accumulated, organized, stored and researched in European and North American institutions. Controversies surrounding museums in London (UK), Berlin (D) and Tervuren (B) as well as ongoing discussions and negotiations of Indonesian and Dutch governments about the restitution of artefacts from various parts of the Indonesian archipelago (Margana 2022) are followed with great interest by anyone who is in some way involved in the study of heritage and restitution, in claims of jurisdiction and ownership, and in tracing personal, familial or communal genealogies and histories. The present NWO-call Research into Collections with a Colonial Context resonates directly with this recent scholarly, museal and societal fascination.

Re:Sound responds to this call by addressing a specific problem within this burgeoning field of scientific and political negotiation, namely the fact that the understanding, conception and formulation of “heritage” and “cultural artefacts” is still primarily Eurocentric (Ochoa 2014, Azoulay 2019, Robinson 2020), shaped by the notion of colonial metropoles (in which economic, material, epistemic, and cultural capital is accumulated, organized, and employed for its own aims) and colonial frontiers (from which all these forms of capital have been – and in some ways continue to be – extracted).

This main problem engenders two important side-problems: 1. A Eurocentric conception of heritage often obscures the coloniality of the history that heritage is supposed to narrate, and 2. A Eurocentric conception of heritage often hinders the access of stakeholders from source communities to their own heritage. Regularly, objects, expressions and their meanings remain unidentified, uncatalogued, mislabelled or inaccurately contextualized. Annotations about acquisition and transportation remain primarily available in formerly colonial languages only. Entrance requirements to the collections can be unwelcoming or downright exclusionary to stakeholders, especially those from outside the academy, a problem that is enhanced by physical distance, including visa requirements of the nation states that previously took the artefacts from the source communities.

Gradually, this situation is shifting through intensified dialogue between formerly colonized and formerly colonizing nation states about restitution and jurisdiction, through the digitization of what has been taken away, and through an increasing exchange of researchers, artists, cultural diplomats (with their various specific viewpoints on heritage curation) between the Global South and the Global North. However, (1.) the histories that are being written, told, politicized, and transmitted remain in urgent need of being diversified, heard and included on more balanced terms. Moreover, (2.) the obstructions that source community stakeholders encounter in trying to access their own heritage remain in urgent need of being softened or eliminated.

In order to address these problems, Re:Sound tries to complicate and diversify the notion of “heritage” itself, to decenter European agency in the curation of “heritage” through the critical engagement with epistemological and cultural penchants towards (a.) objectification (knowing through distinguishing [outer] features), (b.) extraction (knowing through claiming individual, collective, national or universal ownership), and (c.) the assumptions of cultural hierarchy and European superiority with accompanying cultural, political and scientific archival taxonomies. These then unquestioned, and in some cases subconscious epistemes not only formed the fundaments of European imperial and colonial rule, but also of most European scientific practices and disciplines that were meant to submit human, nonhuman, organic and nonorganic environments to a particular human's control (Ames 2003, Ochoa 2014, Mundy 2018).

The knowledge gap that Re:Sound addresses in particular is the question of how to execute this diversification and decentering of European agency in the understanding, conception and curation of “heritage”. There is no scholarly, political, or archival curatorial model to deal with this fundamental problem, probably because the engagement with the problem of the notion of heritage as such is relatively new for European actors in the fields of history, museology and archive curation. And we need European actors for decentering their agency.

Re:Sound approaches this knowledge gap by focusing on sonic heritage. Sound is vibrating air: sound sources set their environments in motion and then sound dies out again. It can only be sensed, observed and registered temporarily. In this respect sound heritage can be compared to dance, performing arts and ritual practice, and it is no coincidence that in most cultures in the world, the conceptual distinctions between speech, song, recitation, outcry, argument, interrogation, debate, prayer, body movement, narration, theatricality and kinesthesia are arbitrary and Eurocentric.

Moreover, sound is almost always composite, a synthesis of multiple frequencies, multiple overtones or resonances and multiple voices at once. By focusing on the audible, the sense of hearing, it is possible to register multiple perspectives expressed at the same time: in agreement or opposition, as various sonic agents in a landscape, as call-and-response, as cacophony, even. Hearing and listening may be linear in time (like reading or writing), but not in space (Clayton 2001, Turino 2008).

More important than the multiplicity of sound, however, is the multiplicity of listener perspectives. Whereas words and images always refer to something outside themselves with a relative univocality, one and the same sound can be experienced to signify not only specific objects or events, but also memories, spaces, places, traditions, intimacies, emotions ranging from revulsion to ecstasy, ancestors and spirits, and these experiences of one and the same sound differ immensely for different people, especially if they hail from a variety of cultural backgrounds (Turino 2008). Hence, the risk of misinterpreting and mislabelling “sound heritage” in the archive is considerable, with far-reaching consequences for its accessibility. Yet, this risk is far from unique for sound heritage curation. Observing the pronounced dynamics of such archival and curatorial tensions in sound heritage curation provides us with information about similar dynamics and tensions in heritage production at large.

What if we start listening to the archive (Hoffmann & Mnyaka 2014, yamomo 2018, Birdsall & Tkaczyk 2019, Hoffmann 2023, Hoffmann 2024), in addition to reading it, with a variety of listeners – source community representatives, artists, activists, researchers from within and outside the academy, archivists from a variety of cultural and geographical backgrounds? That might allow us to “read” the archive dialogically and communally (and hence critically).

Such reading might enrich scientific models of objectification (knowing through observing [outer] features) with models of perspectivism. Perspectivist knowing, observed by anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2013) among many Amerindian communities, occurs through subjectification and empathy, through taking someone else's perspective, not only with regard to fellow human beings but also with regard to nonhuman animals, plants, weather conditions, mountains or rivers. Whereas empathetic subjectification is an accepted mode of knowing everywhere in the world, it has a low status within the sciences that have regarded objectification as the only valid mode of empirical investigation since the European Enlightenment. The multiplicity of listener perspectives to the same sound, proposed in this project, can reach beyond that ocularcentric and one-sided attention for the distinction of features as the primary condition for scientific knowing.

By focussing on sonic heritage, Re:Sound is able to trace the elaborate, complex and multifaceted processes of imperial (a.) objectification, (b.) extraction and (c.) cultural hierarchical ordering and taxonomy that these sonic utterances had to undergo before they could be collected and archived as cultural artefacts, conforming to a European understanding of heritage. Only once the dynamics and intricacies of these processes have been analysed and explicated from European and non-European perspectives, it is possible to decenter them or imagine alternative understandings of heritage (production). In other words, Re:Sound employs sonic sensitivity and analysis as a method to scrutinize understandings and conceptions of heritage, with a particularly critical ear towards the colonial legacy of these understandings and conceptions.