Archives

Our work draws on two decades of research across sound collections in archives worldwide. The starting point is always a specific recorded voice. From there, we search other archives and places to reassemble the audio-visual and, in some cases, textual traces of the speaker.

The archival sources for the first four posters are:

Sound collections:

• Phonogrammarchiv Wien: Rudolf Pöch Collection. The recordings were published on CD as Rudolf Pöch’s Kalahari Recordings (1908) (ÖAW Verlag, 2003).
• Lautarchiv Berlin: collection of recordings made with prisoners of war in German camps during the First World War, 1915–18. The same collection of recordings with African POWs of WWI are also available at Center of Arab and Mediterranean Music in Tunis and at IFAN, Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar.
• Basler Afrika Bibliographien: Ruth und Ernst Dammann Collection, 1954.

Images:

• Basler Afrika Bibliographien, Basel: Ruth und Ernst Dammann Photographic Collection (BAB Archives)
• Weltmuseum Wien: photographic collection
• University of Vienna, Institut für Evolutionäre Anthropologie: photographic collection
• Archive of Harvard Law School: Ettinghausen Collection (photographs taken by internees at Ruhleben Camp, Berlin)

Related publications:

• Anette Hoffmann, Listening to Colonial History: Echoes of Coercive Knowledge Production in Historical Sound Recordings from Southern Africa (Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2023).
• Anette Hoffmann, Knowing by Ear: Listening to Voice Recordings with African Prisoners of War in German Camps (1915–1918) (Duke University Press, 2024).
• Renathe Tjikundi-Meroro and Anette Hoffmann, curated by Dag Henrichsen “The Necklace: Acoustic Pasts, Echoed Futures: Auralgraph from Omaruru, 1954”, Doek!, Issue 13: Dala, 5 August 2024.

Each poster provides details of its archival sources and, where possible, contact details for the relevant archives.