The (Sound) Archive as a Process

Abstract

In recent years, the practices associated with archives have been subject to criticism and redefinition by various disciplines. Although it is a highly eclectic scenario, the discussions converge in assigning to the archive a processual, unstable and incomplete quality. Under this new perspective, which to some extent rejects seeing the archive as a set of documents, an institution that hosts and manages documents or a building where documents are housed, the term ‘archive’ is considerably expanding its polysemy and, at the same time, tends to coexist with expressions and words such as ‘archival practice’, ‘archivalization’, ‘an-archive’, ‘archival multiverse’, ‘poetics of the archive’, ‘archivalterity’ and ‘anarchivism’,
among others. The purpose of the article is to present the general outlines of this perspective and to weigh its scope from the observation of how a set of recordings made in the early twentieth century in Tierra del Fuego, by Charles Wellington Furlong were reproduced with different technologies, interrogated from different disciplines and theories, and heard under different acoustic conditions and aural dispositions. The review of the case in the light of the processual conception of the archive leads, finally, to a discussion around the question: what does the archive store? and, more precisely, what does the sound archive store?