About

Echo Travels is a transnational art project by Anette Hoffmann and Rosemary Lombard. It brings historically and politically significant voices held in colonial sound archives into public circulation. Through close listening, translation and research across dispersed collections, we reconnect recordings with photographs, biographies and historical contexts. Each recording is presented through a mobile sounding poster: a reactivated photograph, a sound piece accessed by QR code and an accompanying side text. These autonomous elements can travel individually or join other works in changing constellations.

The project grows out of Anette Hoffmann’s long-term research into recordings from southern Africa and those made with African prisoners of war and civilian internees in Germany during the First World War. Many of these recordings were made as linguistic, ethnographic or musicological specimens by researchers who did not understand what the speakers were saying.

The speakers nevertheless sometimes used these unequal recording encounters to communicate their own accounts of history and of their present circumstances. They addressed land loss, colonial violence, war, recruitment, displacement, internment and the practices of the researchers recording them. Contemporary translators are central to hearing these interventions in a wider public. Often the first people in decades to understand a recording, the translators become listeners and interlocutors in dialogue with the historical voice and the contemporary contexts in which it is heard.

Each work centres a named speaker rather than the recordist. We do not claim to offer unmediated access to the past or to speak on behalf of the people recorded. We make our own acts of selection, translation, editing and contextualisation visible. The works are mobile, allowing voices to circulate between different spaces and to travel more easily back towards the places and publics from which they came.

Several beginnings

One beginning lies in an installation developed around the archival traces of Abdoulaye Niang, a Senegalese Wolof-speaking prisoner of war whose voice was recorded with German linguists in Berlin in 1917. His recorded voice returned to Dakar in a sound installation presented at the Théodore Monod Museum of African Art in 2024.

The Echo Travels project assumed its present mobile form through work presented at The Commons in Muizenberg, Cape Town, in April 2026, where archival voices, reactivated photographs and translations were brought together.

Ongoing research

The first four works centre speakers from Senegal, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. The wider research encompasses twelve speakers from Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Namibia, Senegal, Somalia, South Africa and Togo, whose voices were recorded between 1908 and 1991 by German and Austrian linguists, musicologists and anthropologists. Future works will be developed selectively, according to the content and situatedness of each recording, the surviving archival traces and the possibilities for meaningful translation and dialogue.