Tonjela
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| free admission |
| Duration: 60 min |
| English |
| Mechanical Arena in the Foyer |
| Part of: Guestroom |
As part of the Guestroom series, Sudanese artist and immersive media producer Abdalsalam Alhaj presents insights into his project Tonjela: Sonic Remains from Sudan. In conversation with curator Paola Ivanov and ethno-musicologist Maurice Mengel, he discusses the preservation of Sudanese musical heritage through the collection and digitisation of cassette tapes – fragile sonic archives that carry the memories, identities, and cultural expressions of Sudanese communities.
In the context of the ongoing conflict in Sudan, the urgency of preserving cultural memory has become greater than ever. Personal collections, music libraries, and recording studios are increasingly at risk of damage, loss, or displacement. Tonjela responds to this moment by rescuing and digitising cassette recordings. It thus safeguards them from disappearance and ensures that Sudan’s musical legacy remains accessible for future generations.
For decades, cassette culture was one of the most important media through which Sudanese music circulated across neighbourhoods, buses, markets, and homes. These tapes carry the voices of musicians, poets, and communities whose sounds shaped everyday life.
Today, many of these recordings are at risk of disappearing due to war, displacement, and the fragility of physical media. The project has collected more than 15,000 cassette tapes and has already digitised over 2,000 recordings, safeguarding them for future generations and opening new pathways for research, listening, and cultural transmission.
Participants
Abdalsalam Alhaj is a Sudanese artist and immersive media producer whose practice explores themes of memory, power, and identity through photography, sound, and virtual reality. Rooted in lived experience and archival research, his work reflects on the passage of time and shifting social contexts, weaving together personal and collective memory into layered forms of expression.
Abdalsalam is the founder of Rift Digital Lab, a creative studio producing immersive digital cultural productions that contribute to an emerging and more inclusive digital transformation in Sudan and across East Africa. He is also the founder of Tonjela, a project dedicated to preserving Sudan’s musical heritage through the collection and digitisation of cassette tapes, safeguarding fragile sonic archives and protecting Sudan’s musical memory at a critical moment of cultural loss and displacement.
Home | Abdalsalam Alhaj | Artist
Dr. Maurice Mengel is an ethno-musicologist and completed his doctorate with a thesis on a Romanian music archive in Bucharest and its role in socialist cultural policy until 1970. Since 2019 he has been head of the Media Department of the Ethnologisches Museum and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin which includes extensive and historically important holdings of film, photo and sound recordings such as the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv.
PD Dr. Paola Ivanov is an anthropologist and curator responsible for the collections from East, Northeast, Central and South Africa at the Ethnologisches Museum of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and a private lecturer at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Free University of Berlin. Her research, publications, and exhibitions focus on the epistemologies and ontologies of African aesthetics, art, and material culture, as well as African history and global interconnections, with particular emphasis on the decolonisation of ethnographic museums. She has led long-term collaborative projects, especially with partners in Tanzania, addressing museum collections and their colonial provenances.
Partner
