Sound, images and postcolonial archives: polyvocal interpretations
Co-arranged by Media History at the Department of Communication and Media and the Sound Environment Centre
OPEN LECTURE
Thursday 28 April
13.15–15.00
LUX B152 (Helgonavägen 3, Lund)
A host of recent scholarship has come to focus on the role and nature of archives not simply as silent repositories of past traces, but as core institutions of power where knowledge is created and defended. As such archives have also been a key technology of colonial contexts. This talk will turn an eye to these dynamics in the digital and the audiovisual realm, to examine the role of audiovisual archives in mediating colonial pasts.
In audiovisual archives such as the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, we not only encounter colonial images and sounds as they were captured and mobilized, but the ways in which they have been categorized and made accessible by the often silent authority of the archive.
The talk will follow some work of the current European research project “Polyvocal Interpretations of Contested Colonial Heritage” to explore how me might not only make these frames of the archive visible, but ask how the multiple voices that become apparent as we do so (from sound, image, metadata) might be used to rethink how we make such material accessible in the future.
Professor Badenoch’s visit to Lund University was financed by the Sound Environment Centre’s incentive funding. Host was Marie Cronqvist from Media History, Department of Communication and Media (KOM). Over the course of two weeks in April and May 2022, professor Badenoch was engaged in several seminars and informal gatherings with students and researchers at KOM and the HT faculties. Apart from the open lecture mentioned above, he gave a talk at the KOM higher seminar entitled “Experimental media archaeology and audiovisual production” and together with Marie he also participated in a workshop arranged by the Sound Environment Centre at Flädie Mat och Vin. Professor Badenoch’s visit helped bridge the gulf between academic disciplines. It also planted new research ideas in the field of the histories of sound and listening to the direct benefit of the subject of Media History and facilitated a closer collaboration between the Sound Environment Centre and the KOM department.
