Travelling with an Archive

The Travelling Archive comes out of over a decade of field recording and documentation of folk music in Bengal, including both Bangladesh and parts of eastern India, by an independent team of two researchers based in Kolkata: Moushumi Bhowmik, noted Bengali singer and writer, and Sukanta Majumdar, sound recordist. After a few years in the field, having begun to build a resource of rich and rare music from across a wide region beyond state boundaries, we felt a compelling urge to share our experience of listening with the widest possible range of audience. Thus was born the idea of The Travelling Archive. We saw archiving as a way of dissemination. We started to keep parts of our field recordings with institutions such as the ARCE and the BLSA. We also began to travel with our sound and audio-visual archive, often back in the field, making presentation-performances, which was our own oral way of transmission of an old orality. In January 2011, we launched our website, www.thetravellingarchive.org, to take our recordings across to a virtual community of listeners. Later, we collaborated with the National Maritime Museum in London on a project to enliven their old films archive.
It is through our work that we are developing our own perspectives and questions on issues of archiving, technology, access, copyright, funding, acquisition and collaboration. ‘Travelling with an Archive’ will be a talk aided with audio and video illustration, on our varied experience of creating and working with archives and the challenges we face.