Conference Agenda

For five days every March, the city of València, Spain, transforms into an open-air exhibit of food stalls, wind band parades, fireworks shows, and, most notably, massive monuments that rival the city’s buildings in size. These artworks, called falles, are the namesake of València’s annual Falles Festival and are designed to represent and parody popular national figures, major world events, and local references through clusters of individual ninots (figurines). Ranging from three to 20 meters in height, these larger-than-life masterpieces tower over festivalgoers on street corners throughout the city, but the monuments’ magnitude juxtaposes starkly with their transient nature. Following a yearlong construction period, the falles are escorted from artists’ workshops to the city center where they are erected on the first day of the festival, and set on fire at the festival’s conclusion. Though newcomers to the festival often lament the destruction of these astonishing artworks, as one participant told me, “What the falles represent and why they are burnt is more beautiful than the monument itself.”

I take the incendiary impulse that underpins Falles as a point of departure to explore the ways the festival and its participants pursue modes of preservation that exceed and challenge the typical archival obsession with material permanence. Building from Diana Taylor’s concepts of the archive and the repertoire (2003), I reimagine the ontology of the archive and question the ways intangible phenomena archive and are archived, with particular attention to music and sound. In doing so, I theorize an “intangible archive” to account for the ways that embodied practice, memory, and ephemeral artforms engage their material mediators and, conversely, how material markers of festivity convey intangible (that is, both untouchable and indefinable) aspects of sociality. Ultimately, I argue that scholars of music and sound must remain attentive to alternative modes of preservation and reflect these modes in the archival “materials” they engage and create, whether written, recorded, or remembered. Understanding cultural practices as intermaterial—that is, as shuttling between materiality and immateriality through repeated performance—allows us to apprehend the affective forces that circulate through these practices by way of their ephemerality.

This paper takes a ceramic bowl kept at the Maya Collection of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (HPMAE) as a point of entry into problematizing the race and class issues involved in gaining access to an archive that is kept far away from its land of origin. This ceramic bowl was part of a burial mound, accompanying the buried individual in his trip to the afterlife. The object produces sound/music that played an important role in the relationship between life and death according to the local cosmogony. However, in its reincarnation as museum piece, this sound object has been materially rendered silent.

The questions guiding my exploration of the collection are not only seeking to engage the materiality of objects whose cultural significance has been rendered invisible due to them being scattered around the world but also to problematize the extraction and colonial dispossession project that took them out of the Mesoamerican geographic and cultural context that gives them meaning. In understanding the conditions and the epistemological frameworks directing the exploration, “discovery,” dispossession, classification, and capture of these traces of the Maya as museum pieces and private collections, this paper shows the many ways in which Maya music, culture, and history have been the subjects of the imposition of a violent silence. Finally, the paper discusses the role of the archive in the dynamics informing what voices, noises, and silences are allowed to exist in the perverse coordinates of empire that inform its holdings and its very materiality.

National memories form and reproduce based on hegemonic, teleologic, state-ordered, and ethnocentric histories and the archival projects that support and reproduce them. Following on recent scholarship about postnational memory by Nadim Khoury and Nigel Young that theorize a challenge to this order, this paper studies Mexican Rarities, an archival project developed in Mexico City in 2020, as a model for a possible postnational re-arrangement of the logics and dynamics that animate the traditional archive. Mexican Rarities was created and conceptualized by sound artists Alfredo Martínez and Juan Pablo Villegas, and LP collector Arturo Castillo as an “anarchive” (anarchist archive), label, and music distribution channel. Its holdings are not original nor unique documents that may not exist anywhere else. Instead, the project’s avowed mission is to identify, retrieve, and re-circulate materials “found in different layers of the Mexican subsoil” and to contribute “to the creation of a sonic memory in Mexico.” The rhetoric used to describe Mexican Rarities refers to a commitment to preserve underground practices but also to the materiality of the repository itself, with its multi-layers of vinyl that ought to be cleared to unearth hidden materials that give voice to the stories that a nationalist understanding of the archive silences.

To better grasp the significance of these archival practices, I engage Cristina Rivera Garza’s work about archives as the previous future of a hyperreal present in her notions of “geological writing” —a strategy to dig out hidden sediments and lost memories I order to assess, reassess, and rewrite the past affectively in the present— and “noriginales” —non-originals, a conceptual challenge to the assumed authenticity and originality of archival documents that highlights the mediating processes that actually make them into documents in the first place—. I argue that these are practices of de-sedimentation that are at work in the very design of Mexican Rarities and may lead us to new understandings of archival memory as a process of potential postnational meaning in continual flux rather than as databases of fixed, static value.