...behind the use of colonial phonograph recordings: A personal approach to Konrad Th. Preuss’ 1914 recordings from the Kágaba in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.

This presentation interrogates the ethical, epistemic, and artistic implications of engaging with colonial sound archives, focusing on the 1914 wax cylinder recordings made by German ethnologist Konrad Th. Preuss among the Kágaba (Kogui) people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. These recordings, long stored in European institutions, exemplify the colonial impulse to extract and preserve Indigenous sonic expressions under scientific pretexts, severing them from their cosmological and ceremonial contexts.
Framed through the lens of decolonial theory, Indigenous ontologies of sound, and critical sound studies, this research contends that these recordings are not mere data but relational entities entangled with memory, ritual, and territory.