AKADEMIE FORUM: ALIA MOSSALLAM

The musicians Kristina Georgieva and Aimee Rabah, both students at the Barenboim-Said Academy, engage musically with recordings of Bulgarian prisoners of war from the First World War and recordings made by Robert Lachmann in Palestine in the 1930s, respectively. From this perspective, Mossallam investigates the use of violence that robbed the narrators of their stories and instead transformed them into archival objects in a colonial project of knowledge production.


This raises a number of questions: What kind of listening is possible in this context? How does the way we listen influence our understanding of and practice of restitution? What can actually be returned and made tangible through the return of a sound archive when a true, final return remains impossible? And what possibilities does the return of stories or “communal remnants” (Ariella Azoulay) offer for present acts of restitution and future legacies of solidarity and survival?


Alia Mossallam is a cultural historian, author, and educator who works with songs that tell stories and stories that recount little-known movements in world history. She is currently a research associate in the project “Towards Sonic Resocialization,” which aims to return recordings from the sound archive of Humboldt University in Berlin to the places of origin of prisoners of war. This is part of her research, which examines both the solidarity between North African laborers and soldiers on the front lines of the First World War and the uprisings that erupted in Morocco after their return from Egypt.

Her work focuses on tracing the physical and political movements of these people through songs documented in the archives of the countries they traveled through, as well as those songs that live on in the collective memory of their homelands.


With musical contributions by Kristina Georgieva (violin) and Aimee Rabah (clarinet), students at the Barenboim-Said Academy


(In English)