DeCoSEAS’ project management is network-based with the explicit aim to decentralize European agency in global flows of knowledge and ideas.
Barbara Titus
Project Leader and Principal Investigator (Netherlands)
Barbara Titus studied musicology at Utrecht University and gained her doctorate from Oxford University in the United Kingdom (M.St. Lincoln College [2000], D.Phil. St Anne’s College [2005]) with a dissertation that was published under the title Recognizing Music as an Art Form: Friedrich Th. Vischer and German music criticism, 1848-1887. (Leuven University Press, 2016). Barbara is a fellow at the African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL) Community. She is co-editor of the journal the world of music (new series), and is a member of the advisory board for the journal Music Theory and Analysis. From 2008 to 2013, Barbara worked as an assistant professor teaching European music history post-1800 at Utrecht University. In 2013, she was appointed associate professor of cultural musicology at the University of Amsterdam.
Barbara is the curator of the Jaap Kunst Sound Collection at the University of Amsterdam. In this capacity, she is the Project Leader and First Principal Investigator of the JPICH-funded project Decolonizing Southeast Asian Sound Archives (DeCoSEAS) that renegotiates established understandings of heritage curation.
meLê yamomo
Co-Project Leader and Principal Investigator (Netherlands)
meLê yamomo is an Assistant Professor of Theatre, Performance, and Sound Studies at the University of Amsterdam and author of Sounding Modernities: Theatre and Music in Manila and the Asia Pacific, 1869-1946. He is co-Project Leader and Principal Investigator of Decolonizing Southeast Asian Sound Archives funded by the European Joint Project Initiatives for Cultural Heritage, and laureate of the Veni Innovation Grant by the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for his project »Sonic Entanglements: Listening to Modernities in Southeast Asian Sound Recordings«. meLê is a 2020 Early Career Awardee of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Sciences, and was fellow at the “Interweaving Performance Cultures” Center (Berlin) and the Global Theatre Histories Center (Munich).
meLê is also a theatre director and composer, and is a resident artist at Theater Ballhaus Naunynstraße where his creations »Echoing Europe« and »sonus – the sound within us« are on repertoire.
Cristina Martinez-Juan
Principal Investigator, United Kingdom
Cristina Martinez-Juan has a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of the Philippines, Diliman. As an Associate Professor at the Humanities Department of the University of the Philippines, Cebu, she taught at U.P. before she moved to New York in 1996 then to London in 2013. In 2016, she established Philippine Studies at SOAS (PSS) under the Centre of South East Asian Studies at SOAS. PSS is an interdisciplinary forum for Philippine-related teaching, research and cultural production in the UK. It functions as a resource and networking hub and as a research gateway which seeks to create avenues for sourcing and inscribing annotative knowledge from cultural originators in the Philippines. The PH studies programming includes digital humanities projects ( Mapping Philippine Material Culture and Digital Filipiniana) as well as SULAT – a creative writing space for UK-based South East Asian Writers. It also hosts a Philippine-lecture series and an Annual Philippine Studies Conference in London. At the SOAS School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, she teaches Philippine Literature and Philippine Cultural Studies for its BA and MA in South East Asian Studies modules. She is a member of the editorial board of the SOAS Journal of South East Asian Research.
Dana Rappoport
Principal Investigator (France)
Dana Rappoport, who obtained her PhD in ethnomusicology at Paris X-Nanterre university in 1997, is currently a fellow ethnomusicologist at the French Center for Southeast Asian Studies in Paris (CASE, CNRS-EHESS-INALCO). Her research deals with music of the Indonesian archipelago, studied by way of formal musicology, anthropology of religion and social organisation. Since nearly 30 years, she has been studying musical traditions through ethnographic fieldworks in Indonesia (Sulawesi, Kalimantan, Flores) and more recently, in East Timor (Atauro).
She is the author of Songs from the thrice-blooded land: Ritual music of the Toraja (Sulawesi, Indonesia) (2009) and the director of the documentary film Death of the One who Knows (Sulawesi, Indonesia) (2020). She takes great effort in making the audio-video material accessible through archiving, and documenting the music in local languages (https://archives.crem-cnrs.fr/search/quick/corpus/?q=Rappoport). She is also co-director of the French Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CASE).
Joséphine Simonnot
Advisor (France)
Joséphine Simonnot is research engineer at CNRS (France) and she is an expert on digitization, sound and audio-visual production, analogue and digital data preservation, musical acoustics and the online disclosure of audio-visual data.
Graduate from « Ecole nationale supérieure Louis Lumière » and from Sorbonne University (musicology), she studied and recorded vocal music in East Indonesia (Flores, Maluku, Sulawesi). In 1999-2009, she was appointed at Musée de l’Homme, Center of research in ethnomusicology (CREM). She designed and managed a web platform sound archives (2009-2020) to share with a wide audience a world musical heritage and to improve innovative and collaborative tools for indexing audio data. She contributes to restitution programmes and she is familiar with European digital project through its participation in Europeana Sounds. Her technical expertise is requested in the construction of a digital access platform.
Today, Joséphine Simonnot is member of PRISM Laboratory (Perception, Representation, Image, Sound, Music), CNRS/Aix-Marseille University.
Archives web site : archives.crem-cnrs.fr
Pierre Prouteau
Pierre Prouteau finished his Phd Buddhism, Bodies and Machines – the Sound Systems of Thailand at CASE/EHESS and LESC/Nanterre in the fields of ethnomusicology and anthropology of sound and ritual. Through the prism of audio technology and by studying Buddhist and non-Buddhist rituals, as well as musical contexts of performance, he focuses on delimitating sonic ontologies as well as deciphering the roles and functions of sound, and sound systems, both as tool of domination and as counter-hegemonic medium.
His chapter in the forthcoming book Asian Sound Cultures, on The Dual Fate of the Twin Horns – from United States anti-communist weapon to the Phetchabun processionnal bands’ sound system (Thailand), will be published at Routledge. He has organized the tour of a processionnal band from Thailand, and has been a radio animator.
Thongbang Homsombat
Thongbang Homsombat comes from a small village 90 km from the Laotian capital Vientiane. As the only one of ten siblings, she studied at the National School for Music and Dance in Vientiane taking Violin and Music Theory as main subjects. Later, she worked with the Media Section of the National Library and became the main administrator of the Archives of Traditional Music in Laos (ATML) in 2002. She is involved in extensive field work throughout the country and in training projects for audiovisual archiving in other media institutions of Laos. Next to her work for ATML, she did her BA in English language at Vientiane’s Dongdok University, and she studied accounting, and sound technology.
Organization:
The collection of the Archives of Traditional Music in Laos (ATML) was officially started in 1998. It forms part of the National library of Laos. Initially, the approaches towards item collection and preservation within the National Library were modelled after the earliest safeguarding projects of anthropologists and ethnomusicologists of the First Berlin School, aimed at collecting ‘representative items’ for non-destined later use. After 2002, the ATML slowly allowed for a wider variety of collecting principles and activities. The collection is growing slowly to nearly 4000 sound items and around 500 video items from all over the country, not counting stills, other pictures, drawings, and transcriptions. Our first research report, edited in 2001, is one of the most requested publications in the entire library. The database is self-made and uses Windows Access as a basic layout. This database has been transferred step-by-step to an OPAC platform. All visitors, mostly from abroad but also school classes, try to undertake fieldwork and request assistance from the archive.
Gisa Jähnichen
Archives of Traditional Music in Laos [ATML]
Prof. Dr. Gisa Jähnichen (Ecomusicology, Performance Practices of Southeast Asia) teaches at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. She is the Chair of the ICTM Study Group on Musical Instruments, Secretary of the IASA T&E Committee, Ambassador of IASA to Malaysia and China, and she also teaches at Guangxi University of the Arts, Vienna University, and Humboldt University Berlin. She is the consultant for the Archives of Traditional Music in Laos at the National Library of Laos. She studied at Charles University, Prague, Humboldt-University Berlin, and Vienna University. Her many writings were widely published and are accessible online and in libraries around the world.
Organization
The collection of the Archives of Traditional Music in Laos (ATML) was officially started in 1998. It forms part of the National library of Laos. Initially, the approaches towards item collection and preservation within the National Library were modelled after the earliest safeguarding projects of anthropologists and ethnomusicologists of the First Berlin School, aimed at collecting ‘representative items’ for non-destined later use. After 2002, the ATML slowly allowed for a wider variety of collecting principles and activities. The collection is growing slowly to nearly 4000 sound items and around 500 video items from all over the country, not counting stills, other pictures, drawings, and transcriptions. Our first research report, edited in 2001, is one of the most requested publications in the entire library. The database is self-made and uses Windows Access as a basic layout. This database has been transferred step-by-step to an OPAC platform. All visitors, mostly from abroad but also school classes, try to undertake fieldwork and request assistance from the archive.
Thongbang Homsombat comes from a small village 90 km from the Laotian capital Vientiane. As the only one of ten siblings, she studied at the National School for Music and Dance in Vientiane taking Violin and Music Theory as main subjects. Later, she worked with the Media Section of the National Library and became the main administrator of the Archives of Traditional Music in Laos (ATML) in 2002. She is involved in extensive field work throughout the country and in training projects for audiovisual archiving in other media institutions of Laos. Next to her work for ATML, she did her BA in English language at Vientiane’s Dongdok University, and she studied accounting, and sound technology.
Pudentia MPSS
Chairwomen of the Oral Traditions Association (Asosiasi Tradisi Lisan)
Pudentia MPSS is Chairwomen of the Oral Traditions Association (Asosiasi Tradisi Lisan), the head of the Institute for Strategy and Community and Cultural Empowerment as well as Analysis of the Impact of the Cultural Environment at the Faculty of Humanity University of Indonesia. She completed her sandwich programme doctoral studies at University of Indonesia, Leiden University, and UC Berkeley on Malay Oral Tradition Studies. She was a member of President Yudoyono’s EPG Indonesia Malaysia (2009-2011) and Expert Staff in the Indonesian Representative Office in UNESCO, Paris (2009/2010). Since 2012, she has been a member of the Indonesian Committee for Memory of the World UNESCO. In 2018, she was invited by University of Melbourne as guest researcher and panel speaker on ASILE (Australian Society of Indonesia Languages Educators). Currently she leads the Competency Standardization Program for the Intangible Heritage Expert Team, Directorate General of Culture The Ministry of Education and Culture Republic of Indonesia. She has written several books and articles, among others Transformasi Sastra: Analisis Kasus atas Cerita Pantun Sunda Lutung Kasarung, Tranformation of Literature: Case of Sundanese Story Lutung Kasarung), Balai Pustaka, “Revitalization of Mak Yong in the Malay World”, Jurnal Wacana , Vol 12, No 1, (April 2010) and has produced several films such as the documentary films “Lifting the Soaking Trunk: Mak Yong (Mengangkat Batang Terendam)”, “The Prayer of a Bell Ringer’s Child”, and “Chasing the Morning Dew to Europe (Mengejar Embun ke Eropa)”, widescreen movies, and “Bugis Heritage Becomes Memory of the World” (I Lagaligo).
Jabatin Bangun
Studied ethnomusicology at the University of North Sumatra, anthropology at the Postgraduate Program at the University of Indonesia, philosophy at the Postgraduate Dryarkara School of Philosophy Jakarta, and Urban Arts at the Jakarta Arts Institute Postgraduate School. I do research and development of art programs in the archipelago, making audio recordings, radio broadcast programs, print media publications, and documentary films of Nusantara arts. I develop arts education programs that increase the appreciation and appreciation for cultural diversity in Indonesia, and I teach at IKJ (Jakarta Arts Institute) Jakarta since 1997. I served as deputy dean, official dean, and vice chancellor of the IKJ academic field. For two terms I became a member of the Jakarta Arts Council (2006-2012) and digitized the Jakarta Arts Council archives. Member of the Indonesian Music Award Classification for three years. Secretary General of the Indonesian Oral Traditions Association 2009-present. Many are involved in the programs of the ministry and government agencies of the Republic of Indonesia.
LaVerne de la Peña
Verne de la Pena obtained his Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Hawaii.
His research areas include Benguet Kankana-ey, Tagalog, and Filipino hiphop. He has presented papers and lectures on burial rites and prestige feasts in Buguias, Benguet as well as repartee singing and drinking events in Sariaya Quezon. He has given lectures and seminars on the same areas all over the country and internationally.
Dr. de la Peña received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in composition from the
University of the Philippines. He has written for various media, including chamber, choral,
dance and theater. His works have been published and performed in parts of Asia and America. His most recent large work is Putri Anak, Isang Bagong Komedya, a theater piece premiered at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in April of 2017 and restaged in UP Diliman in August the same year. The work fuses the Philippine Spanish colonial genre called komedya with Southeast Asian stylistic elements.
As the Director of the UP Center for Ethnomusicology, he leads ReCollection, a flagship
program that Revisits, Repatriates, and Recollects music from the research sites of UPCE
Founder and renowned ethnomusicologist, Jose Maceda. He also spearheaded the bigger goal of establishing Community Documentation Centers in far-flung localities in the country.
Aside from being the UPCE Director, he has also been the Dean of UP College of Music
since 2017.
Sol Maris Trinidad
UP Center for Ethnomusicology, Philippines
Sol Maris Trinidad (b. 1980) is an ethnomusicologist, arts manager and cultural worker. She completed her Bachelor of Music in Musicology from the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Music. She was a member of the UP Rondalla where she played bandurria and a Founding Member of the UP Tugtugang Musika Asyatika (TUGMA). With them, she has travelled as performer and stage manager in the Philippines, China, and Thailand. Among her research areas are Cebuano church music, dalit (sung prayers) and band music of the Tagalog, traditional music from the islands of Panay and Mindanao in the Philippines and choral music management of the Philippines. She has presented papers on these in the Philippines, Thailand and Italy and has been published in the bi-annual arts and ideas magazine, International Gallerie. Sol maintains fiscal management of the UP Center for Ethnomusicology and is currently pursuing her Masters in Musicology from UP Diliman.
Citra Aryandari
Citra Aryandari is founder and chairman of the board in Citra Jejak Bangsa Foundation and Citra Research Centre where she oversees the creation and issuance of grants, leads cross-foundation strategic programs and initiatives, and directs the implementation of conceptual thinking.
Since 2006, she has been a lecturer at the Institut Seni Indonesia Yogyakarta and shortly after completing her doctoral education, she became a guest lecturer at the University of Amsterdam in 2014, specializing in ethnomusicology and other cross-disciplinary sciences. It was this journey that led her to the big goal of contributing to education, arts and culture through the Citra Research Centre.
Organization
Citra Research Centre (CRC) acknowledges that the present role of non-formal education is very important for the advancement of the skills and career developments of the young generation. Because, somehow and sometimes the processes to create and develop their talents are hampered by the absence of support systems.
That is why we were formed as a non-formal education institution to become a liaison while providing space for those who want to think, learn, and develop their career. Our principle to concentrate in the field of cultural and performativity studies does not stop at the realm of the only study, but also covers the variety of art fields as widely as our expertise.
Our vision is simple, we want to open up many opportunities for the science development with a touch of original characteristics, build an educational ecosystem, competitive in national and international industries, and introduce the potential of young people to the world.
Since 2015, we have been here as a reservoir of new ideas about art and culture that seemed stagnant. We encourage young generations to be what they aspire to be, support every idea that is created as a form of creativity, and give freedom to think, to express and to explore.
Viela Wiradz
Citra Research Centre – Indonesia
Viela Wiradz is co-founder and executive director in Citra Jejak Bangsa Foundation and Citra Research Centre. She works with the foundation to design and implement programs, strengthen organizations and networks for independent and artist-driven productions, and develop inclusive leadership and resources in this area.
She focused on arts management and the creative economy, as well as industry-based arts and cultural studies. From her experience, she saw the great potential power of Indonesian cultural expression. Therefore through the CRC program, she wants to develop a cultural ecosystem that has a big impact across generations.
Organization
Citra Research Centre (CRC) acknowledges that the present role of non-formal education is very important for the advancement of the skills and career developments of the young generation. Because, somehow and sometimes the processes to create and develop their talents are hampered by the absence of support systems.
That is why we were formed as a non-formal education institution to become a liaison while providing space for those who want to think, learn, and develop their career. Our principle to concentrate in the field of cultural and performativity studies does not stop at the realm of the only study, but also covers the variety of art fields as widely as our expertise.
Our vision is simple, we want to open up many opportunities for the science development with a touch of original characteristics, build an educational ecosystem, competitive in national and international industries, and introduce the potential of young people to the world.
Since 2015, we have been here as a reservoir of new ideas about art and culture that seemed stagnant. We encourage young generations to be what they aspire to be, support every idea that is created as a form of creativity, and give freedom to think, to express and to explore.
Veronika Kusumaryati
Veronika Kusumaryati is a postdoctoral fellow at the Asian Studies Program at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Studies, the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, and the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University. Her scholarship engages with the theories and historiography of colonialism, decolonization, and postcoloniality. She has published her research in Landscape Architecture journal, Indonesia, and the Asia-Pacific journal of Anthropology.
She holds a PhD in anthropology with a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies from Harvard University. With Ernst Karel, she produced a film entitled Expedition Content which has been screened at the Berlin international Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel at Centre Pompidou, and Lincoln Center.
Expedition Content is an augmented sound work composed from 37 hours of tape. In 1961, filmmaker Robert Gardner organized the Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea (today West Papua). Funded by the Dutch colonial government and private donations, and consisting of several wealthy Americans wielding 16mm film cameras, still photographic cameras, reel-to-reel tape recorders, and a microphone, the expedition settled for five months in the Baliem Valley, among the Hubula people. Michael Rockefeller, of the Standard Oil Rockefellers, was tasked with taking pictures and recording sound in and around the Hubula world. The film documents the strange encounter between the expedition 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.
Dominggus Elcid Li
Dominggus Elcid Li is the Executive Director of IRGSC (Institute of Resource Governance and Social Change) (2013-now), an Indonesian think tank based in Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara Province. His research examines the correlation between the subsistent community and human trafficking. His research focus is in political sociology, in particular about the corrupted institutions and the fading away of the state, and its relation to subsistent communities. He is also investigating the problem of the urban poor as migrants from rural West Timor area. Using action research, he is also developing several urban movements including anti trafficking movement (2014-2015), urban participatory democracy (2016), and also developing the people’s bio molecular laboratory to face the pandemic COVID-19 (2020), and Research Institute of Biosecurity and Bioindustry. He graduated from the Sociology Department, University of Birmingham (2013).
Layan Nijem
Jaap Kunst Sound Collection, Project Assistant
Layan Nijem is a graduate student of cultural musicology at the University of Amsterdam. She is interested in sound as a way of knowing, steering away from Western epistemology and its reliance on historical written text. By engaging with sound recordings, her research investigates the dynamics of cultural memory and the politics of narrative in relation to identity formation, sovereignty and cultural agencies. Since 2019, Layan has been a student assistant working in the Jaap Kunst Sound Collection under the supervision of Dr. Barbara Titus. Apart from research, Layan holds a Bachelor of Music in classical Viola performance from Conservatorium Maastricht.
Mayco Santaella
Research Team Member
Mayco Santaella is Associate Professor and Head of the Film and Performing Arts department at
Sunway University. He studied at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa as an East-West Center fellow
researching music and dance traditions of the extended Sulu Zone and its links to the Nusantara
region. He carried out fieldwork for his doctoral studies in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia as a Fulbright
recipient (2012–2013). His research foci include the study of music and dance within the extended
Sulu Zone, and popular music in maritime Southeast Asia.
MyArchives
MyArchives (Malaysian Audio-Visual Archives) is a project developed by the ICTM National
Committee of Malaysia under the auspices of the International Council for Traditional Music. This
project consists of a digital archive of performing arts developed through the joint efforts of
scholars, performers and researchers focusing on traditions, past and present. The material is
preserved in digital format for the purposes of research, sustainability and viability of the performing
arts of the country.
Sunway University is one of Malaysia’s leading private universities which is a strictly not-for-profit
institution and dedicated to quality education, supporting enterprise, and undertaking research
focused on key global problems.
Nicole Emmenegger
Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
Nicole Emmenegger is a Product Manager at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision responsible for developing and leading international projects for the target group Research and Digital Heritage professionals. She also coordinates the EUscreen network of European broadcast archives and sits on the Board of the EUScreen network. In 2021, with funding from Mondriaan Fonds, she co-founded the project Sounds Familiar, which, over several years, aims to examine how Sound and Vision can decolonise its archival practices and policies. Emmenegger holds an MA in Cultural Policy from Goldsmiths College and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Heritage Studies from the University of East London. She has previously worked for Europeana in The Hague and Historypin in London.
Organization
The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV) based in Hilversum, The Netherlands, manages one of the largest digitized media archives in the world. Packed with (among others) radio, television, YouTube videos, objects, written press, podcasts and games. We preserve our daily growing media collection as cultural heritage for perpetuity. At the same time, we closely follow all movements on the global media landscape. Our starting point in everything we do is the importance of free media for our democracy. We work with a variety of partners, such as creative media makers, specialists, researchers, national and international universities. This way, we contribute to an open, free, inclusive and media-savvy society.
Johan Oomen
Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
Johan Oomen is Head of Research and Heritage Services at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and a researcher at the User-Centric Data Science group of the VU University Amsterdam. Throughout his practice, Oomen works on initiatives that focus on providing access to digital heritage. He has a background in information science, media studies and computer science, and his current research focuses on exploring the potential of digital cultural heritage in the wider Cultural and Creative Industries. He is a board member of the Europeana Foundation, the EUscreen Foundation and the PublicSpaces Foundation. Oomen is an advisor to the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, Time Machine Organisation and the Dutch National Research Council for Cultural Heritage, and co-chair of The Netherlands Heritage Network. In 2020, he co-founded the NLAIC working group on Culture and Media and the Cultural AI Lab.
Organization
The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV) based in Hilversum, The Netherlands, manages one of the largest digitized media archives in the world. Packed with (among others) radio, television, YouTube videos, objects, written press, podcasts and games. We preserve our daily growing media collection as cultural heritage for perpetuity. At the same time, we closely follow all movements on the global media landscape. Our starting point in everything we do is the importance of free media for our democracy. We work with a variety of partners, such as creative media makers, specialists, researchers, national and international universities. This way, we contribute to an open, free, inclusive and media-savvy society.
Fredrik Molin
SOAS Radio
Fredrik Molin is the Station Manager at SOAS Radio. Fredrik oversees the day to day running of the station, overseeing the programming, training students as well as producing podcasts for the school and its academic centres, showcasing SOAS research and regional expertise. Fredrik has also provided training and support on sound recording and postproduction on three modules taught in the Radio Studio: “Podcasting”, “Presenting World Music on Radio” and “Development Communications.
Organization
SOAS Radio is an independent online radio station and production company based at SOAS, University of London. SOAS Radio exists as an independent media hub for students, academics and like-minded communities to share their knowledge and stories. SOAS Radio broadcasts and produces a variety of music and speech podcasts and radio shows with a focus on Africa, Asia and the Middle East. SOAS Radio also functions as a production company. Clients include the Centre of African Studies, PositiveNegatives, Mo Ibrahim Foundation, Royal African Society, London International Development Centre and the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy. SOAS Radio has acted as a consultant of Communication for Development projects in the UK and Africa and worked in the Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Mozambique and Ghana, contributing to the setting-up and running of Biso na Biso, a community radio station for the Forest semi-nomadic Indigenous People in the North-East Republic of Congo and JT Live Radio, Ghana, a youth-led online radio station based in Jamestown, Accra.
Khamchanh (Ton) Souvannalith
Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre
Khamchanh was born and raised in Luang Prabang. He has studied and attended trainings in Thailand, Vietnam, and the USA on Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), Museum Management, Conservation and Exhibition of Southeast Asian Collections, and Conservation of Textiles. In 2015, Khamchanh was a fellow at the Department of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York through the Asian Cultural Council. During his fellowship, he participated in the American Alliance of Museum Conference in Atlanta representing TAEC’s work and collection. At TAEC, Khamchanh conducts ethnological research in rural villages, ensures the cataloguing and preservation of museum objects, manages TAEC’s resource library, and provides talks and tours to museum visitors in English and Lao.
Organization
The Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre is a cultural heritage social enterprise in the UNESCO World Heritage town of Luang Prabang, Lao PDR. It is the only independent museum and resource centre in Laos dedicated to the collection, preservation, and interpretation of the traditional arts and lifestyles of the country’s many and diverse ethnic groups.
TAEC features permanent and temporary exhibitions on the ethnic cultures of Laos, handicraft stores selling products from over 600 rural ethnic minority artisans, a family activity centre, and a library. To date, TAEC has welcomed over 190,000 Lao and international visitors, and has become a regional leader in cultural heritage management and community development. Today, TAEC is engaged in a broad range of museum and community engagement activities, including handicraft training, school outreach programmes, research, and advocacy.
In September 2018, TAEC launched the temporary exhibition “Voices of the Wind: Traditional Instruments in Laos.” The TAEC team embarked on two years of field research in 28 villages of four provinces, documenting the musical practices of eight ethnic groups in northern Laos. During the research trips, 4,069 pictures, 436 videos, and 84 audio recordings were collected. A selection of this media is accessible to exhibition visitors on panels, audio stations, and multimedia tablets. They are also available online on TAEC’s website and on Youtube. All the collected data (interviews, pictures, audio and video recordings), sorted by themes with descriptions, are stored in a hard drive accessible to all in TAEC’s library. As most of community members involved project (musicians, instrument makers, singers, elders, etc.) live in remote areas of Laos, TAEC organised the repatriation of the collected data in eight of the main villages in which the research were made. In each community, TAEC brought DVDs and SD cards with all the recordings made in the community, as well as colour booklets in Lao language highlighting the musical practices and musicians documented for the exhibition. Finally, a pop-up exhibition was organised in each village with colourful information panels, musical instruments to try, screenings of the videos, and a small performance of the local musicians. All generations gathered during the events, reconnecting around traditional musical practices of the community.