In recent decades, the sound archives of European and North American institutions have emerged as abundant research sources for ethnomusicologists, folklorists, and anthropologists, offering unique records of musical practices from the Global South. Although ethnomusicologists have explored the possibility of repatriating these archives to address their colonial legacies, certain aspects of this research approach diminish the agency and subjectivity of the collaborators involved in the repatriation process. This paper investigates past and present dialogues by collaborating with Mestre Iuri Santos' Capoeira Angola Group Estrela do Norte, based in Bloomington, Indiana, to create a capoeira music album. The study draws on capoeira sound archives produced by the African American linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner in 1940 and 1941 in Salvador, Bahia—stored in the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University—as well as interviews with contemporary capoeira practitioners. Based on two years of fieldwork, the study includes semi-structured interviews, participant observation of capoeira classes, “sound elicitation” (Lobley 2022) sessions with Lorenzo Dow Turner’s sound collection, and close listening to the album’s pre-recording, recording, and post-production processes. This paper proposes a novel theoretical-methodological approach to sound archives, offering an alternative mode of scholarship that interweaves the archive and the repertoire (Taylor 2003). By fostering a dialogue within performance-based ethnomusicology, it emphasizes sound-centered participatory research as an engaged practice. Likewise offers new perspectives on performing sound archives from the standpoint of the research collaborator.

Bullerengue is a musical tradition and an epistemic site led and preserved by cantadoras (elderly women singers) in the Afro-Colombian Maroon Caribbean. Early researchers in the region—such as Guillermo Abadia, George List, and INIDEF—reveal different modes of disregarding Black women’s knowledge, resulting in misrepresenting bullerengue in folklore and the sound archive. Such “epistemic erasure” (Berman- Arevalo 2021) and “production of ignorance” (Fernández Pinto 2014) hail from the “colonial legacies of folkloristics” (Briggs 2021). However, List’s rigid archival practices allow us to transform the silencing archive into a medium of unsilencing. Hence, I build from Brooks’ idea of sound culture shaped by women (2021) and Ochoa Gautier’s concept of recycling sound archives as a decolonial strategy (2020) to unsilence cantadora Juana Garcia Blanquicet (1884–1965). Recent advancements in audio restoration and artificial intelligence allowed me to recover Garcia Blanquicet’s (in)audible voice from List’s archive and discuss its audibility with her granddaughter, Juana Rosado (b.1939). The ethnographic contrast of archival research with oral memories evidenced Garcia Blanquicet’s active force in her village’s bullerengue. Her resounding subjectivity reclaims bullerengue’s social significance for women’s resistance, epistemologies, and ancestrality. I argue that researchers who shaped the official discourse were instrumental in silencing cantadoras, given that, as outsiders, they were unable to grasp the agency and influence of Afro-descendant elderly women. However, cantadoras use bullerengue as a (re)sounding historical vehicle for the ancestresses and their heirs to communicate cross-generationally, overcoming the political silencing of hegemonic history and the ultimate material silencing of death.

In 2024, the Colombian dance, music, and theatre group Conjunto de Tradiciones Populares de Colombia, El Palenque de Delia visited Indiana University and Vanderbilt University, both institutions holding important archives of Delia Zapata Olivella, the group’s founder. Delia Zapata Olivella was a Colombian dancer, researcher, scholar, teacher, and activist renowned for being the first “MujerNegra” (Lozano 2017) to perform at the Teatro Colón in Bogotá - a colonial institution, as its name indicates. After Delia’s passing in 2001, her daughter Edelmira Massa Zapata assumed the company’s artistic direction, preserving, amplifying, and transforming Delia’s legacy. In their recent visit to the U.S., the company embarked on a series of events directly related to the collections held at the archives of both institutions. Through performances, academic exchanges, and visits to the archives, the group re-enacted part of the archive at multiple levels. This paper examines specific instances in which the seemingly fixed materiality of the archive, like notebooks and photographs, was brought to life by the company members through the “ephemerality of the repertoire” (Taylor 2003), giving a different meaning to the collections. I argue that the active use of the imagination was key for “conjuring” (Otero 2020) and “refiguring” (Hoffmann 2015) Delia’s archive, creating a sense of intimacy through space and performance. This reading to the archive shows the interconnectedness of the Americas in a multisensorial way and sheds light on the need for better accessibility to these collections to unsilence more hemispheric (hi)stories.