Contribution short abstract:

In "The Sound of Memory" we immerse in "ArchivOlares", a family archive of traditional Venezuelan music compiled between 1960-1980 by Oswald Lares, which consists of music, videos, photographs, interviews and instruments. It was activated as an outcome of an intergenerational family experience.

Contribution long abstract:

How does one deal with the legacy of a family archive that encompasses a great collection of traditional Venezuelan music? How can the archive be activated with care, be shared, (re)ordered, contextualized and its multiple materialities and temporalities be synchronized?

Between the 1960s and 1980s Oswaldo Lares Soto, a Venezuelan architect and music lover, initiated a long journey throughout Venezuela in search of the traditional rhythms of his country while rediscovering his own identity. From his travels emerged a unique archive of audio and video recordings, photographs, letters, interviews and a collection of instruments, assembled on his own initiative.

ArchivOlares emerges from this family legacy. It was created in 2013 by Oswaldo’s son Guillermo and his companion Laura Jordan to disseminate and keep this archive alive together with the richness and wisdom of Venezuela's traditional music. They propose to imagine and create new ways of managing the archive; they strive to open it for audiences, making it proactive and alive. The initial independence of this archive has been maintained by forming alliances with national and international musicians, researchers, artists and anthropologists as in my case. Together we imagine and create new formats while dealing with the response-abilities that are part of the process. This is how our collaboration called "The Sound of Memory" started. It is also the title of a short documentary of the research process which includes interviews and archival material through which we immerse ourselves in the inception of ArchivOlares with its diverse materialities and intergenerational experience.