Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/975483
maltatoday SUNDAY 29 APRIL 2018 Interview 14 By Raphael Vassallo The concept of 'time travel' inevitably raises two questions. One concerns the mechanics: how does one revisit the past... the other is very simply: why? In this case: why is a return to the past so important to begin with? So how did this project start, and what does it hope to achieve? My own interest grew mainly out of previous research I did into local mu- sic, when I was working on another project, 'Lost Voices'. I was specifi- cally looking for old recordings, but I also stumbled on a lot of other material: audio-tapes, photographs, films shot on Super8, and so on... and there's always a story behind these things. Eventually, however, you be- gin to realise that there is generally a lack of reference to popular history on the Internet. Not just in terms of institutionally archived material: there is a lack of photographs, digit- ised films, audio recordings... Could that be simply because the idea of archiving 'popular history' is, in itself, something recent... so no one ever bothered with it before? In fact, the content in national archives is largely concerned with documenting State activity. And ac- cess to even that is limited: this da- tabase belongs to PBS, that one to DOI... separately, there is another issue that a lot of this material is not being digitised and preserved: many old PBS tapes have been recorded over, for instance. But even if it is preserved; the archives will, to an ex- tent, dictate what you can access of it, and what you can't. Because these and other national institutions are concerned somehow with 'national identity': and they create a sense of identity, by allowing you to see some aspects of your history, but not nec- essarily all. We are 'Maltese' because we have reference to Independence, etc; we are not 'Sicilian' or 'Tunisian' because we have reference to this or that. So, archives become very im- portant in determining and shaping who we think we are today. Inter- estingly, however, when technology started to become accessible to the wider public – in the late 1950s and early 1960s – people used it to start documenting their own lives. Tech- nology gave them the platform to re- cord what THEY wanted to preserve, not what they were told was histori- cally valuable. So the 20th century is important to us, because that's when popular history started to be docu- mented, not just on paper, but also in audio-visual archives... Let's talk about audio archives first: what do these 'echoes of the past', if you will, tell us about how those generations saw themselves? One interesting thing is that Mal- ta's record industry started in 1931, three years after the introduction of the electric microphone. Our earliest recordings are electric, not acous- tic; and until the 1950s, much of the music of the world was recorded in three-minute format – it was an industry standard, dictated by the technology of the day. So whether it was a Maltese song, or Mississippi Delta Blues, or Indian raga, or Ara- bic maqam – which usually goes on for two hours – everything had to be done in three minutes. And there was no post-production, either: it was all live. So you have this capsule, of whoever was in that studio at the time, with his voice and instrumen- tation... documented by this 'sculp- ture', the grooved record. Once tape came in, things changed. Both the length and the content could be de- termined by the person recording, as opposed to the commercial compa- ny that owned the studio. The inno- vation enabled people to document other things apart from commercial music. Now, these records are his- torical documents in their own right. But unless we salvage the content, we risk losing a huge reference to popular history in the 20th century... When you say people started documenting 'other things'... what sort of things, exactly? To start with, when the audio-reel came in – and it was hugely im- portant, not only in Malta, for re- cording folk and popular music – it empowered people: they could hear themselves on playback instantly; run it forwards, run it backwards... they could edit the recording them- selves. Above all, they could transfer those reels from community to com- munity. Between Malta, Australia, Canada, and New York, Maltese families would send each other au- dio messages by post: it became a very important tool for community diaspora connection. A family would get together to make a recording to send to their cousins in Australia, or vice-versa: they might sing a song – a lot of ghana, for instance – introduce themselves on tape, share the latest family news... But that's just audio. From the 1940s onwards, you also had the widespread proliferation of cameras. Another format worth mentioning is the photographic slide. Families used to do 'slide- shows'... You're bringing back memories now... I think we still have the old family slide projector at home somewhere... It was often the way things were documented before home video came in: slide-shows of family holi- days, weddings, events and so on. And the same could be said for film, too. At street level, the cine-camera arrived in the mid-1960s. Already, there was a particular stratum of society which had the money to buy cameras. And inevitably, as technol- ogy got cheaper it became more ac- cessible. But in the meantime, one really interesting thing is that the Maltese communities in Australia, Canada, etc – who tended to be bet- ter off – would come and visit in summer, and bring their own Super8 or cine-cameras with them. And everyone would get them to film the village festa, their own family events, and so on. In Australia alone, there is a huge amount of this content – shot in Malta in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s – but a lot of it is dispersed, possibly in danger of being lost. Once the slide projector bulb has gone, or the audio-reel recorder is bust... these things just lie there for decades. Sometimes they're kept as family heirlooms, but often they be- come 'useless' and get thrown away. Today, however, they are considered historical artefacts, and their content is very valuable because it represents a snapshot, in time and place, of how we lived. Without that, future gener- ations will have no reference of what daily life in Malta used to be like. It sounds like a certain amount of serendipity must be required, though. If you're researching something specific – say, the work of a particular author – there are obvious places to look. But something as vast as what you're talking about... where would you even start? And how do assess the worth of the material you're looking at? Surely, a lot of it would be repetitive... That's exactly what I asked my- self initially. When it came to VHS alone, and the technology was cheap and widely available... people started shooting absolutely every- thing. I thought I'd end up sifting through endless stacks of the same kind of videos: children's parties, etc. But for one thing, even these seemingly mundane records have their own peculiarities: what people wore; how they looked; the context; the environment... But what also emerged is that, when technology was not cheap and available... when Why should the Maltese care about their cultural heritage? It's been packaged and sold. It's something for tourists. That, too, is why we need references to our popular history REFERENCE In search of lost