“…Well-intentioned efforts to decolonize archives might make this assumption. But other factors should be considered in relation to the production, circulation, and valuation of recorded Indigenous images and sounds (see Poole, 1997). To consider such videos as counterarchives, one needs to engage meanings fashioned during participation and viewing, today and into the future.…”
In this article, we complicate the notion of sonic return in the context of postmillennial digital media technologies that have transformed how Indigenous people of the Bolivian Andes engage self‐reflectively with their own music and dance practices. We take a capacious approach to the notion of the archive and argue that these media interactions, where people make and circulate their own audiovisual materials, represent a space of counterarchival work. We consider our distinct and changing approaches to sound recordings in our respective fieldwork and highlight how media‐making agency has entered the hands of Indigenous actors. Notable here is a striking preference for the audiovisual over the solely audio, a preference that throws into relief the idea of the sound archive and its future. We point to alternative forms of audiovisual curation that may not be shaped to the ends foreign researchers might imagine, but that nevertheless might lead to more decolonized engagements of the future. We consider a video—created as part of a campaign for women's singing of Potosí to be legally recognized in heritage law—and explore how this seemingly outsider‐focused audiovisual production involved Indigenous people in its making, reception, and recursive recirculation. We approach these issues by drawing on our multidecade and cross‐disciplinary research trajectories in the Bolivian Andes and our more recent collaborative research on heritage lawmaking during the government of Evo Morales (2006–2019).
“…Well-intentioned efforts to decolonize archives might make this assumption. But other factors should be considered in relation to the production, circulation, and valuation of recorded Indigenous images and sounds (see Poole, 1997). To consider such videos as counterarchives, one needs to engage meanings fashioned during participation and viewing, today and into the future.…”
In this article, we complicate the notion of sonic return in the context of postmillennial digital media technologies that have transformed how Indigenous people of the Bolivian Andes engage self‐reflectively with their own music and dance practices. We take a capacious approach to the notion of the archive and argue that these media interactions, where people make and circulate their own audiovisual materials, represent a space of counterarchival work. We consider our distinct and changing approaches to sound recordings in our respective fieldwork and highlight how media‐making agency has entered the hands of Indigenous actors. Notable here is a striking preference for the audiovisual over the solely audio, a preference that throws into relief the idea of the sound archive and its future. We point to alternative forms of audiovisual curation that may not be shaped to the ends foreign researchers might imagine, but that nevertheless might lead to more decolonized engagements of the future. We consider a video—created as part of a campaign for women's singing of Potosí to be legally recognized in heritage law—and explore how this seemingly outsider‐focused audiovisual production involved Indigenous people in its making, reception, and recursive recirculation. We approach these issues by drawing on our multidecade and cross‐disciplinary research trajectories in the Bolivian Andes and our more recent collaborative research on heritage lawmaking during the government of Evo Morales (2006–2019).
“…In the exhibition Another Life (Thessaloniki 2016), a middle-aged female visitor, perhaps reimagining past visual economies (see Poole 1997), remembered having just seen children dressed in rags, although this was actually a fairly rare depiction in the photographs she had seen:…”
Section: Fig 5 Yannis Behrakismentioning
confidence: 99%
“…In the exhibition Another Life (Thessaloniki 2016), a middle‐aged female visitor, perhaps reimagining past visual economies (see Poole 1997), remembered having just seen children dressed in rags, although this was actually a fairly rare depiction in the photographs she had seen: These children’s faces in the photographs haunt me. How can you leave them suffering like that, hungry, dressed in nothing but rags?…”
Section: Refugees’ Mobility Kinship and Gendermentioning
This article explores how photographic images of refugees in modern Greece condition national imagination and construct new ethnopolitical moral fantasies. It also examines how repetitive images of suffering in photographic exhibitions become constitutive of a new regime of mobility in the country during the financial and refugee crisis. I argue that refugees’ images articulate kinship and gender norms, national archetypes, ethnic hierarchies, and ideas of mobility and rootedness. They bind together northern European landscapes and resistant Mediterranean subjects and weave new and old visualities into a single mobility aesthetic that reinvents national memory and initiates new political moralities.
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