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Contribution short abstract

My talk discusses the Artists-in-Residence program at the African Music Archives (AMA) at JGU Mainz. The program is intended to give African musicians and sound artists access to a unique archive of African popular music, enabling them to use it for artistic research under their own questions.

Contribution long abstract

Since its founding in 1991, the African Music Archives (AMA) at JGU Mainz has provided a space where academic knowledge production and dissemination meets musical practice, exemplified by numerous concerts, lectures, performances, and exhibitions. The Artists-in-Residence program, launched in 2023, represents an attempt to bring both worlds closer together by inviting African musicians to conduct artistic research at the archives for one month at a time, developing their own questions and presenting the results to a public audience in a final performance at the end of their residency. The program is designed for groups of two artists and is intended to give them the opportunity to collaborate with each other and with other individuals working with and at the AMA in an open-ended way. Parts of the residency and final performances of the artists are documented on camera.

My talk reflects on the experiences made while planning and realizing three residencies with a total of five invited artists to date, together with colleagues from the Department of Anthropology and African Studies. I want to discuss the possibilities and challenges of commoning commercially realeased African popular music in a German university archive through transdisciplinary collaboration, focusing on artistic and academic research practices and institutional aspects such as financing, copyrights and visa bureaucracy, and how the involved actors navigated them. Next to sharing my experiences, I intend to critically evaluate the program for future editions, hoping that it can contribute to a more egalitarian space for individuals across continents and disciplinary backgrounds.