Olivia Melkonian and Dr Rim Irscheid are hosting a sound archiving and memory workshop on Sunday, 2nd February 2025 at the REACH space entitled “Archival Skills Training: Preserving Sound and Memory in Urgent Times”.

This workshop is open for both beginners and those with experience in archival practices and sound recording. It invites participants to collectively explore what an archive is, what it means to practice it, and why it is important in times of political turmoil, the erasure of collective memory, and unquestioned truth-claiming under authoritarianism. From motive to medium, we will discuss the theory behind memory-based archival practices and share accessible, audio production tools to encourage the building of a sonic archive. With a focus on personal, family, and community history, we aim to foster a collaborative environment for knowledge and skill exchange, through a lens of thoughtful preservation and appreciation.

The workshop is open to 12-15 participants. Please RSVP to confirm your attendance by 31 January by emailing rim.j.irscheid@kcl.ac.uk. Lunch and soft drinks will be provided. Please email her also if you have any dietary requirements.

About the organisers

Olivia Melkonian is a producer, DJ and sonic archivist invested in projects of cultural preservation. She archives dialect, ritual and collective memory with a focus on family and the home. In her work, Olivia interrogates the endangered Western Armenian experience, which remains under threat of erasure. Through her practice, she presents memory as a tool of resistance and recording as an act of revolution.

Dr Rim Irscheid is a postdoctoral research fellow in artist-led curation working on the ERC/UKRI-funded project “Beyond 1932: Rethinking Musical Modernity in the Middle East and North Africa”. Her research is concerned with the intersection of archival interventions, institutional critique and contemporary sonic practices from Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt. She runs the Beyond 1932 Artist-in-Residency Programme at King’s College London to foster knowledge and skills exchanges between archival researchers and contemporary performers from the SWANA region.