Starting from the concept of archiving, Producer, DJ, and Sound Archivist Olivia Melkonian hosts a workshop dedicated to the practice and importance of Sonic Archiving.

At first, shyly sitting in this room with other silent partners, the workshop immediately felt intimate. As Olivia began, the very idea of what an archive is came into question with two key points that made my cogs spin: naturally, archiving is a preservation of the past, but when coming from ethnic backgrounds that have been subjected to genocide, it is a highly political practice and a method of reclamation. Olivia, coming from an Armenian background, alongside some other people in the group, expressed the value of reclaiming history's past “from the people up,” telling beautiful stories of her six-year ongoing journey recording her family's past and present. Archiving their dying dialect, using memory as a tool of resistance, and most importantly, taking archiving literally in her own hands on the streets of Bourj Hammoud in Beirut, one of the most important hubs of the Armenian Diaspora.

Inspiring and teaching the group to equip themselves in the practices of sonic archiving, Olivia’s sound-heavy background comes into play. She went through the easiest and best ways to record, edit, catalogue, and distribute sound (shoutout to Audition and Audacity software). Away from the technical aspects, Olivia focused on ethics—a part of the practice that sometimes feels lost when learning about archiving. Sonic archiving will inherently involve spoken stories, but the manner and intention in which you go about that practice should not be taken lightly, Olivia teaches. Factors like safety, trust, consent, ownership, and even aftercare should always be important considerations when recording someone's spoken past. Verbally relaying old wounds and traumas, regardless of the generation, will always be hard. Therefore, Olivia instills these points sweetly into us, not only as a precaution but as a habit. The workshop spanned across the technical, practical, and even theoretical aspects, enlightening the group with cardinal anthropologists like Adnan Celik and his theories on ‘Memorycide’ (the destruction/genocide of memory), and spurring us on to think about other archives for inspiration (my personal favorite was Big Village and the Syrian Cassette Archive—you are welcome ).

What felt the warmest about the workshop, whether you came from an archiving perspective or not, were the stories and ideas that naturally floated between the group. One participant wanted to begin recording the lost ghost stories of Armenia while another wanted to expand their project on objects that feel like home. Concerning the sounds of the 2023 large scale military attack in Artsakh, one woman asked how do you stomach archiving that? She had tried to listen to what minimal sonic and visual evidence was left and found herself sick with a flutter of emotions. But the question remained in the air—not only how but why should you stomach archiving violent, triggering sounds? Especially when those sounds are of your people? To that, the small air of silence was filled with the calm voice of Olivia, reassuring us that although the process is cruel, it is pivotal to preserving the dignity of those people and circling back to the importance of collective memory. Whether it is beautiful or not, history must come from the voices of the people who endured it and, to reiterate Olivia’s powerful motto, “To remember is a tool of resistance, to record is an act of revolution.”

Leaving the workshop felt purely of sweet inspiration. My brain bathed in new ideas and even new perceptions of what archiving means for smaller communities, let alone how critical archiving can be for preserving something as ever-changing as language and dialect. Regardless of whether archiving is what you came to the workshop to do/learn, it is what you’ll yearn for after leaving.