Expedition Content (2020) is an augmented sound work for cinema created by Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati, an exploration in “decolonizing the archive” through deep listening. The nearly imageless film is constructed from recordings made in 1961 in West Papua by Michael Rockefeller, heir to the legendary Standard Oil family who had been involved in early oil exploration in New Guinea. Karel and Kusumaryati composed the work from the archive's 37 hours of tape which document the strange encounter between the expedition (which also produced Robert Gardner's 1963 landmark ethnographic film Dead Birds) and the Hubula people. The piece reflects on intertwined and complex historical moments in the development of approaches to multimodal anthropology, in the lives of the Hubula and of Michael, and in the ongoing history of colonialism in West Papua. The screening (78 minutes) will be followed by a zoom discussion with the filmmakers.

The "Documenting Audibilities" film series investigates modes of knowledge inscription and transmission through films that document, explore, and themselves constitute a wide variety of musicking and sounding acts. By investigating how film is used in relation to sonic acts, the series intends to raise questions about technologies of transmission, circulation and inscription of knowledge (sounds, imagery, speech, writing, performance, etc.) and the materials on which they inscribe: memories, (human) bodies, paper, shellac, hard drives, or songs. We strive to bring together a multiplicity of filmic perspectives on music and sound: scholarly and artistic, longue durée history and ethnographic case study, fact and fiction, indigenous and collaborative. At each screening, we aim to facilitate a discussion between filmmaker, scholars, and audience to investigate how film serves as a medium of sonic representation and as itself a medium that works in and with sound. Please contact us to join the mailing list or to suggest a film to screen.

Emily Clark (e.h.clark@uva.nl), Layan Nijem (l.k.i.nijem@uva.nl), Otto Stuparitz (g.stuparitz@uva.nl)