Archival Echoes

Nabuurs&VanDoorn, collect other voices, 2018, digital print on vinyl wallpaper

Spontaneously we joined a workshop with Nkisi at the top floor of our residency at Hangar Lisbon. The workshop is part of ‘On the Wolf’s Trail’ a Research Program curated by Margarida Mendes. Nkisi is an artistic musician/ researcher based in London with Kongo/ Belgian roots. She uses sound as a way to explore spiritual liberation technologies embedded in music and dance and experiments with ways to keep these traditions alive. Rhythm, sound and noise are used to activate traces of memory inscribed in and by the body in motion. Through the use of sensory codes, Nkisi merges music, performance and research in ancient musical technologies and invites participants to dance with the invisible to activate embodied forms of revolution and resistance for the unmaking and making of worlds.

Nabuurs&VanDoorn, collect other voices (SKINSLANG), 2019, archival pigment print on cotton rag paper

We lay together, head to feet and vice versa, scattered through the darkened room filled with the penetrating scent of incense. Smell touches our senses directly without intervention of rational filters and directly lays claim to our mental library of memories. Thus, we immediately feel to have become part of a spiritual ritual. Nkisi performs sonic crafts — technologies of communication, archives of ancestral knowledge, and tools for collective cohesion. Across cultures, musical traditions have long been used to shape different realities, channeling vibrational harmonics to influence bodies, environments, and the unseen. In our recent past many of these practices, once central to healing and education, have been forced underground by dominant epistemologies. Through guided listening, voicework, and embodied sonic exploration, we went on a journey through musical phenomena transcending— spectral resonances of archival recordings, the presence of sonic imprints, and rituals of sound as metaphysical force. After a while the music stops and we are asked to consider if sound as form of paralinguistic transmission captured something beyond music?

Nabuurs&VanDoorn, Untitled 2 (collect other voices), 2018, archival pigment print on cotton rag paper

Participants respond with intense descriptions of hallucinative memories they had during the session. To us it recalled memories to when we recorded images and sound in an ethnographic museum in Leiden. Through a Satanic diagram we connected junkie to shaman and forrest to alley with the key at the time being halluginetic herbs. It also related to our recent Zwischenlandschaften works. Nkisi spoke about searching for ways to speak to the archive and making the audience a vessel for the evolution of ancestral energy. Instead of sound we use light to connect fragments of archives to public space. This way making public space a vessel to enter into dialogue with histories hidden in plain sight. Our methods both engage ancestrality as methodology, like the session uncovers hidden sonic lineages, and reactivates lost or suppressed traditions through embodied practice. As living archive, voice and rhythm as written language and our censorship act as conduits for a collective experience, preserving intergenerational memory and opening portals to the unexplainable.