The Entangled Colonial History of Sound Recordings

The beginning of a process

Many of the phonographic recordings of the Phonogrammarchiv, such as Rudolf Pöch’s Papua New Guinea recordings (1904–1906), form part of its colonial legacy. Other sources connected to these holdings are dispersed within Austria and around the world.

Unless one is able to find such sources internationally, it is impossible to access and reconstruct this history from multiple perspectives. With this project we intend to address this issue.

Read more about the project
On a table are all the materials relating to the Poech Papua New Guinea Collection (1904-1906): Three large volumes of transcripts with an opened volume containing an exemplary transcript page, a metal matrix and a wax plate cast, two CDS and the booklet of the 'Complete Edition of Historical Holdings 1899-1950', Series 3, and two stacks of the 94 epoxy resin plate casts of the sound recordings.

Findability

An list of institutions and sources connected to the expedition to Papua New Guinea

The goal of this website is to give a transparent overview of the institutions that hold the dispersed objects, audio recordings, photographs, film recordings, and paperwork, ‘collected’ and produced by Rudolf Pöch. They were made before, during, and after his colonial expedition to today’s Papua New Guinea (then known as British New Guinea, German New Guinea and Dutch New Guinea), Indonesia (Dutch East Indies), and Australia between 1904 and 1906.

With this project and website, we wish to highlight in an ethically informed way the sources and the historical implications they reveal, as well as the institutions that hold them, and the responsibility they have in dealing with them transparently. The annotated list is intended to aid findability and provide information on access, for future engagement with the materials, whether academic, artistic, or personal.

View the list of institutions

Beyond Pöch

Centering Austria’s and Vienna’s research institutions as part of an entangled colonial history

This project is an important step in a longer, continuous collaborative research process. Our intention is to go beyond Rudolf Pöch, to see his collections as the result of one of many comparable Austrian colonial research projects. We hope that scholars around the world will continue this research with us.