Re:Sound renegotiates Eurocentric understandings, conceptions and curations of “heritage”. This Eurocentrism obscures the coloniality of the history that “heritage” is supposed to narrate and obstructs the access of source community stakeholders to their own “heritage”. There is no scholarly or curatorial model to decenter European agency and diversify understandings of heritage (curation). Re:Sound bridges this knowledge gap by focusing on sonic heritage, in particular two colonial sound collections from Indonesia, now located in the Netherlands, The Jaap Kunst Collection at the University of Amsterdam, and the Philips Holland Omroep-Hollandse Indies radio broadcasts at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.  

Re:Sound explores whether and how the inherent divergence of validations and understandings of sonic expression provides ways to reconsider established notions of heritage. It does this through Indonesian PhD and stakeholder research in the above Netherlands-based sound collections, and by fostering a transcontinental and inter-Asian curatorial network of academics and source community stakeholders through workshops and summer schools. 

With these activities, Re:Sound aims to improve the access to Netherlands-based sound collections for Indonesian source community researchers and stakeholders. This improvement emphatically includes options for physical and digital restitution. Through the research of a next generation of Indonesian scholars and stakeholders, Re:Sound moreover employs colonial sound recordings as historical sources, attendings to those recorded voices that are not represented in written historical sources and hence run the risk of being “written out” of history.

Through a more inclusive historiography due to it being sound-source based and through improved access of source community stakeholders to their own heritage, Re:Sound redirects curatorial agency to Indonesian stakeholders – a redirection that impacts on a diversification of notions of “heritage “and a decentering of European agency in heritage curation.

Photo credit: Suara Keheningan (2024) by Agus Suwage & Titarube