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- KOSTIMA - Counter-hegemonic voices in the music archive: political readings, contextualisations and contemporary references
KOSTIMA - Counter-hegemonic voices in the music archive: political readings, contextualisations and contemporary references
From 2023 to 2027, the CWM will be carrying out the BMBF-funded joint project "Networking - Exploring - Researching. Alliance for University Collections II" funding line will be carried out at the CWM. In this project, the CWM, the European Centre for Jewish Music in Mainz and the Archive for the Music of Africa in Mainz are dedicated to the indexing, content processing and thematic linking of parts of their music collections. The research focus is on extracting political messages and the social contextualisation of the collection contents. The colleagues at the CWM are working on Raimund Vogels' estate as part of the project. These are field research recordings from the Nigerian state of Borno State, which were made in the 1980s and 1990s. At the time, Raimund Vogels was researching music at the ruling courts of Maiduguri and investigating hegemonic narratives on dynastic succession, changes of rule and colonial power structures. The Borno Music Documentation Project (BMDP) was created in the course of this research stay. The legacy includes significant statements on power relations between Christians and Muslims in Borno State, as well as on intra-Nigerian power imbalances in general, documents multiple dichotomies and dynamics of urban and rural lifestyles and reflects pre- and post-colonial perspectives encoded in musical products. In the project, the data is digitised, catalogued, entered into a database and thus made available for research and teaching.