AKADEMIE FORUM: ALIA MOSSALLAM

How Does a Song Travel through Time?

Berlin Sound Archives and the Critical Labor of Decolonization and Return

In this talk, Alia Mossallam will examine sound recordings made with North African prisoners of World War I, housed in the Lautarchiv (sound archive) of the Humboldt University in Berlin. Musicians and Barenboim-Said Akademie students Kristina Georgieva and Aimee Rabah will engage musically with recordings of Bulgarian prisoners of World War I and the Robert Lachmann recordings made in 1930s Palestine, respectively. Mossallam will look at the layers of violence that stripped the stories from the storytellers, rendering them as archival objects in a colonial knowledge-production project, and ask questions such as: What kind of listening can be undertaken in this context? How does the way we listen factor into our understanding and practice of restitution? Knowing that no ultimate return is possible, what are the many different returns that can be experienced in the return of a sound archive? And what possibilities does the return of stories, of “communal remains” (Ariella Azoulay), present for acts of restitution as well as future legacies of solidarity and survival?

Alia Mossallam is a cultural historian, writer, and educator interested in songs that tell stories, and stories that tell of little-known movements in world history. She is currently a research associate for the project “Towards Sonic Resocialization,” which is aimed at returning recordings held in the Lautarchiv of Berlin’s Humboldt University to the communities of the prisoners of war’s origin. This is part of her research tracing solidarity between North African workers and soldiers on the fronts of World War I, and the insurrections that resulted upon their return from Egypt to Morocco. Her work focuses on following their physical and political journeys through songs documented in the various archives of the countries they passed through as well as those songs that continue to resonate in communal memory in their homelands.

Presented in English
With musical contributions by Barenboim-Said Akademie students Kristina Georgieva (violin) and Aimee Rabah (clarinet)