How does the natural world around us bear traces of colonial pasts, presents, and futures? Focusing on a water-based installation by London-based visual artist Tamara Al-Mashouk as an alternative archival formation, this paper explores how, in the absence of the human voice, non-human agents perform the memory of those who can no longer speak. In the durational performance I’d search forever, I want to remember (2023), the artist bears witness to 34,361 refugees who died in the sea as an act of solidarity with those who lost their lives in the water while crossing the English Channel. The accompanying installation features a custom-made wave machine using the water of the English Channel. With only the sounds of crushing water accompanying the uncanny presence of large plastic containers that signify unjust silences, Al-Mashouk reminds us of the variety of archival surrogates that make audible traces of the past. As artists diverge from previous romantic depictions of water and colonial oceanic imaginaries in decolonial approaches to archiving (Morse 2022), many foreground the ‘archival agency’ of water which can witness the impact of human activity on ecological and cultural erasure beyond the realm of the human (Yazzie 2018). Drawing on scholarship on archival interventions in the arts (Van Alphen 2023; von Bismarck 2023), I argue that socially engaged artists strategically use archive as metaphor and leitmotif to challenge anthropocentric methods of archiving and remembering by appealing to spectators’ moral values and sensory perception.

More than eighty years after he experimented with radio technology and produced the world’s first electronic music, Halim El Dabh and his oeuvre reverberate as loudly as ever. Between recent retrospective exhibitions, archival dives that inform multimedia sonic installations, and the acquisition of the “Halim El Dabh Papers” by Northwestern University, the Egyptian composer, philosopher, healer, and ethnomusicologist’s archives endure as material inspiration for work in sound, memory, and humanistic philosophy. This paper explores Halim El Dabh’s archive from two perspectives: direct engagement with the university archival holdings – specifically sketches, manuscripts, and audio recordings of “Osmo-Symbiotic” (1952); and critical engagement with contemporary sound artist Joe Namy’s archival research on El Dabh that yielded sonic installations – specifically “Study for Sonic No. 7 and No. 10” (2021) and “Dub Plants” (2024). These works all address issues of agriculture, plant communication and movement through/as sound, and organic matter. By positioning these archival traces of El Dabh into conversation with one another through existing works (recordings, performances, and written text), this paper opens the broader question of how archives function in relation to creativity and scholarship. What methodological distinctions can we articulate between “practice-as-research” and sonic historiography when working with the same sets of archival materials? How do recordings, performances, and written texts all echo El Dabh’s enduring legacy on sound and world-making, especially in relation to organic matter? How does an archive of experimentation become inspiration for further experimentation in ways that unsettle the forms and objects of archival matter?

Much of Egypt’s material musical heritage – that is, the physical stuff of musical pasts, from wax cylinders and LPs to ephemera like concert programmes and recording contracts – resides not in official institutional archives, but rather in private hands, being bought and sold via the expansive networks that make up the country’s used goods market. Over the past decade, these networks have coalesced around the weekly Diana Market, held every Saturday in downtown Cairo, which attracts increasingly varied crowds of antique enthusiasts, collectors and tourists. Based on ethnographic research with the dealers and collectors who constitute this market, this paper addresses the materiality of music: the ‘stuff’ of music-making; the labour that goes into its preservation and circulation; and the varied uses to which this material is put. Engaging with scholarship on the sensorial aspects of materiality, in this chapter I listen, look and touch my way through the market. I ask what it means for Egypt’s musical pasts to circulate like this, attending to what Howes (2022) calls the ‘sensori-social life’ of musical things. I contextualise the recent growth of Diana Market within increasing popular interest in ‘the archival’ as it relates to arts and culture in Egypt and beyond, noting the recent proliferation of projects and sound installations which explicitly engage with this archival impulse. By conceptualising street market as archive and street market as method, this paper argues for the necessity of attending to materiality and the senses when engaging archival objects, sonic and otherwise.