On Thursday (February 27) at 14:30 at the Allard Pierson Museum, as part of Het Archief Speculatief (The Speculative Archive) Conference.

»Tumrap susilaning gěndhing winor laguning lělagon«

Keynote performance-lecture by meLê yamomo (University of Amsterdam) in conversation with Sri Margana (Universitas Gadjah Mada) and Amabilita Sudarmanto (Universitas Gadjah Mada), with the artistic and production support of Jay Yamomo, Rafaga Svara, and Yiping Tian.

Are recorded voices, music, and sound cultures stored in museums and archives in Europe just in exile, waiting for their return to their communities? Sound and media scholar Jonathan Sterne (2003) calls sound media resonant tombs where the voices of the dead reside. yamomo (2021) argues that sound archives are cemeteries of deceased sounds—removed from the communities that keep them alive through collective memory. Can we reanimate them by reconnecting them with source communities? In doing so, can the archive speak back? In this performance lecture, meLê engages in conversation with historical sound documents and recordings from Southeast Asia “on exile” in archives and asks the sound archives to speak back.