ARCHIVE

Onyeka Igwe's Resetting The Record is a soundscape that opens a radiophonic third space, in which people from pre-colonial West Africa are brought into conversation with people in modern-day London through music, voice and rhythm.

In collaboration with the Art Assassins, a young people’s art forum, Resetting The Record samples digitized versions of wax cylinder recordings accessed through the British Library that preserve the spoken word, storytelling, song, and musical instruments of Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Recognizing that it is impossible to divorce colonial images from the regimes of power that created them, the artists use sound to ‘make a space for themselves,’ following the Black diasporic tradition of ‘the sounds, the statics, and the grooves’. They offer a reflection on anthropology as a discipline. Noting and working beyond the limitations of technology, and how it often shapes anthropological research, the artists ask 'What does that mean, of how we draw conclusions of the people we’re not a part of?' For example they note, when wax cylinders were used to capture sound in Australia and the pacific islands, the technology couldn’t register large groups of people or women’s voices, so researchers drew conclusion that large groups of people and women just didn’t sing.

Led by the questions: What would it mean to make anthropology of ourselves? and, If we were doing field recordings of our life today what would we record?, the artists archived their own sound, by sampling and flipping their their everyday lives. The sounds of transportation along commutes, banter, and conversations with elders, offer a sonic snapshot of how a young person from South London and their multigenerational connections might be understood in 100 years time." - Described by Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow 2023, Iru Ekpunobi