TheMuseumsLab Alumni Contribution | Looking back
In September, I curated a sonic programme devoted to the status of sound in African restitution policy and discourse for TheMuseumsLab in Berlin, with a departing focus on recordings made of African prisoners of war in German internment camps.
Dylan Robinsonto listen without extraction, selchí:meleqel what does this sound like?
To open, we began with the acoustic traces left by Senegalese tirailleur Abdoulaye Niang—who was among prisoner of wars recorded during the Prussian Phonographic Commission (1915-1918) in Berlin. My presentation was made on behalf of Dr. Anette Hoffmann, who could not join us due to illness.
In the panel, moderator Nnenna Onouha and panellists Mohamed-Ali Ltaief and Elsa M’Bala explored positions on sonic restitution and resocialization, drawing on their presentations that respectively recontextualized the genealogy of early music records in Tunisia/North Africa and in the diaspora departing with recordings from the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, and an early colonial recording collection made in Cameroon.
At TheMuseumsLab’s 2024 Public Event, the sonic framed the evening with a post-panel fellow discussion with Elsa, Abdalsalam Alhaj and Fatma Jabberi Farroukh. To close, Elsa performed the listening session Time to listen, featuring post-independence African music cassettes from the Ass Niang Collection in the presence of various constellations of practitioners, cultural and state representatives from Ghana and Germany.
With thanks to TheMuseumsLab MfN team, Meryem Korun, Solveig Reitschel and Daniel Neugebauer, our contributors and the fellow cohort for their openness and reflections.
[To many more invocations]