ACIP Workshop: Archiving Otherwise
This year’s African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) Workshop, titled ‘Archiving Otherwise: Sound thinking and Sonic Practice’, brought together CHR staff and fellows, UWC faculty members and students, ACIP fellows, and sonic practitioners for a three-day workshop in early April.
Developed in conjunction with the CHR sound working group which includes the workshop steering committee (Aidan Erasmus, Valmont Layne, Ben Verghese, and Michael Bhatch), this workshop sought to think and work through a variety of questions regarding sonic practice and theory, and how they relate to of issues related to the archive, public space, labour, materiality, memory, and academic and other public facing institutions. In keeping with the workshop’s title, it also sought to develop collective, pedagogical, and archival methodologies that enabled other ways of thinking about critical questions common to all arts and humanities enquiries.
These methodologies included two sound walks through UWC’s campus, accompanied by Vergese alongside the steering committee, which involved a tour of UWC’s campus accompanied by a series of sonic interventions, sound-clips of events and speeches, and oral historical accounts, of UWC and its history. This multi-sensorial experience, opened up questions regarding memory, history, public space, and the sonic in provocative ways, and along with record players located at the conference venue, which were made available for sonic presentations and listening sessions, fostered a pedagogical experience immersed in the sonic and its inquiries.