Archival Soundscapes with Onyeka Igwe

Northcote Thomas wax cylinder records at British Library
Wax cylinder recordings made by Northcote Thomas stored in their original cases in the British Library Sound Archive.

[Re:]Entanglements is collaborating with the Art Assassins, the young people’s forum of the South London Gallery in Peckham. As part of the project, the Art Assassins are working with a number of London-based artists and researchers with connections to West Africa. The idea is for each artist or researcher to use their creative practice to help the Art Assassins explore the Northcote Thomas collections and archives, and consider its relevance for young people in South London today. The Art Assassins’ work will culminate in an exhibition at the South London Gallery in May 2020, which they will curate themselves.

The first artist to collaborate with the group is Onyeka Igwe. Onyeka is a filmmaker, programmer and researcher. She is widely known for her video work which uses dance, voice, archive and text to expose hidden narratives. Her work explores the physical body and geographical place as sites of cultural and political meaning. Onyeka won the 2019 Berwick New Cinema Competition for her film the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered. The film explores three interconnected narratives – a story of the artist’s grandfather, one of ‘the land’, and another detailing an encounter with Nigeria.

Onyeka Igwe, still from 'the names have changed'
Onyeka Igwe. Still from her prize-winning film the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered.

For her project with the Art Assassins, Onyeka has been exploring the sound recordings made during Northcote Thomas’ anthropological surveys in Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The work is ongoing, so here we report on our activities so far and our plans for developing this strand of the project over the coming months.

Listening to the archive

At an initial workshop with Onyeka, the Art Assassins explored the [Re:]Entanglements SoundCloud site, at which the complete set of Northcote Thomas’ digitised sound recordings have been made available. They spent time listening to a selection of the recordings on high quality speakers in the South London Gallery’s Clore Studio. Participants were struck by the texture of the phonograph recordings and how the crackles and pops created their own rhythms. This led into a discussion about how the recordings were made and Onyeka explained more about the wax cylinder recording process employed by Thomas. To give a more contemporary context, Onyeka set up a vinyl record player so the group could get hands on with the analogue sound equipment and learn how sounds can be manipulated.

Onyeka Igwe and the Art Assassins listening to Northcote Thomas recordings at SLG
Onyeka Igwe and the Art Assassins listening to a selection of the digitized Northcote Thomas recordings in the Clore Studio, South London Gallery.
One of the first recordings made by N. W. Thomas. Recorded in Benin City on February 2nd, 1909, a few days after his arrival in Nigeria, this song is performed during the Ugie Ewere festival to bring ‘Ewere’ blessings to all homes.

Visiting the archive

The group visited British Library Sound Archive in Kings Cross to find out more about its huge collection of historical ethnographic and ethnomusicological wax cylinder recordings. The British library holds over 700 discrete recordings made by Thomas between 1909 and 1915. It was also responsible for producing the digitised versions of the recordings that the Art Assassins were able to access online. Dr Janet Topp Fargion, Lead Curator of World and Traditional Music, hosted the visit. After travelling down several floors deep into the basement of the British Library the Art Assassins were amazing to find themselves face-to-face with shelves of Thomas’ original wax cylinders. They were then introduced to the team responsible for digitising the wax cylinders and witnessed a live demonstration of the process.

Janet Topp Fargion showing the Art Assassins the Northcote Thomas wax cylinder records at the British Library
Dr Janet Topp Fargion showing the Art Assassins the Northcote Thomas recordings in archival storage at the British Library.
Janet Topp Fargion showing the Art Assassins the Northcote Thomas wax cylinder records at the British Library
The Art Assassins gained an insight into the work of conservators and researchers at the British Library Sound Archive.
Wax cylinder phonograph recorder at the British Library
The British Library’s sound conservation department has a large collection of historical recording equipment, including this wax cylinder phonograph recorder similar to the one Northcote Thomas would have used during his anthropological surveys of Nigeria and Sierra Leone, 1909-15.
In order to digitize the wax cylinders, the British Library had this bespoke machine built for them. British Library sound conservators demonstrated the digitization process.

Making an audio archive

Back at the South London Gallery, Onyeka and the Art Assassins started to plan how they might create their own archive of sounds reflecting their own lives. Relating back to the Thomas’s work, Onyeka asked the group to consider the categories he had used in his anthropological reports. Would these same categories work for understanding young people living in London today? The group debated this and offered up other categories to guide their sound recording process.

Onyeka Igwe and the Art Assassins discussing Northcote Thomas recordings at SLG
Onyeka Igwe and the Art Assassins back at the South London Gallery, reflecting on what they have learnt about sound archives and considering how they might include sound recording in their response to the Northcote Thomas collections.

The group are continuing to build up their own archive of sound recordings ranging from everyday sounds and actions to capturing their own and their families’ accents and phrases. They will also be conducting oral histories with people living the UK with a connection to Nigeria and Sierra Leone which will become part of their larger archive.

Onyeka Igwe and the Art Assassins discussing Northcote Thomas recordings at SLG
Comparing the categories that Northcote Thomas used to order his anthropological data and collections with the Art Assassins’ lists of topics that reflect their own experiences in contemporary South London, and which will guide their sound collecting work.

In preparation for the exhibition in at South London Gallery in May, the group will be working with Onyeka to explore how this developing sound archive can take shape as an artwork. Some of the early ideas are to draw on the technologies and techniques of sound systems and other urban music cultures, using sampling and remixing to produce new arrangements of sound.


The Art Assassins are making a film to document their project. As part of this they are interviewing each other about their experiences. In this clip Art Assassin, Sam Baraitser Smith, reflects on the visit to the British Library and some of the issues raised engaging with the sound archives.

Art Assassins at Autograph

Art Assassins at Autograph, collage
Collage produced by members of the Art Assassins at a workshop at Autograph, combining images from the N. W. Thomas archives with Autograph collections.

This is the latest is a series of blogs reporting on our collaboration with the Art Assassins, the youth forum of the South London Gallery. The programme includes a number of workshops run by project partners, each focusing on a different aspect of the N. W. Thomas archives. UCL’s Museum Conservation programme will be helping the Art Assassins work with artefacts; the Igbo Studies Initiative will help unlock the sound recordings; and Autograph will help the participants think about photography and representation.

Autograph started in Brixton in the 1980s as the Association of Black Photographers. They are now based in a fantastic gallery and archive space in Shoreditch. Autograph’s mission is to enable to public to explore issues around identity, representation and social justice through work produced by artists who use photography and film. It has a remarkable photographic collection dating from the 1860s to the present day.

Members of the Art Assassins at a workshop at Autograph led by Ali Eisa, Public Programme Manager.

One of the big questions that inevitably surfaces whilst working with anthropological archives is the issue of representation. Since their first encounter with the Northcote Thomas archive, the Art Assassins have been debating this issue and thinking about how it informs their response to the materials. This has led them to devise a manifesto to guide them:

  • The problems we encounter via the archive should be reflected in our work
  • We will document our understanding of the archive as it changes over time
  • We will consider our individual relationship to the archive given our different backgrounds
  • We will avoid replicating the problematic methodologies associated with the archive
  • We will question what the value of the archive is for young people today

To explore this further the group have participated in two workshops with Ali Eisa, Public Programme Manager at Autograph, which looked at how people and communities are represented in contemporary photographic archives. We asked Art Assassin, Jordan Minga, and Ali Eisa to talk a bit more about what we got up to in the workshops.

Can you give some background to Autograph as an organisation and the archive that it has collected?

Ali: Autograph shares the work of artists who use photography and film to highlight issues of identity, representation, human rights and social justice. Since its foundation in 1988, Autograph has collected photographic material, which reflects our mission: to use photography to explore questions of cultural identity, race, representation, human rights and social justice. The Archive constitutes Autograph’s permanent collection of photography, and covers key periods in the formation of culturally diverse communities in Britain, including the post-war Windrush generation and Victorian era. It contains photographic works made by renowned fine artists, social documentary and high street studio photographers, plus personal family albums and vernacular imagery.

What did you do with Ali in the first session at Autograph? 

Jordan: The first thing we did at Autograph was explore the current exhibition of work by the British-Liberian artist Lina Iris Viktor. After that we had the pleasure of getting to look at three portfolios of photographs in the Autograph collection. We discussed the compositions and the intentions of the photographers. 

Art Assassins at Autograph, working with the archives
Members of the Art Assassins explore the Autograph collections.

What was the intention of introducing the Art Assassins to the different collections that Autograph has collected in its own archive?

Ali: The intention was to introduce the Art Assassins to a contemporary photographic archive that can give them a critical perspective on issues of representation, race, identity, human rights. This was seen as important in the project because the young people are responding to a colonial era archive, which from a contemporary perspective is highly problematic in its representation of the black subject. So, we were interested in generating a critical conversation with the young people around issues of representation, history, memory and identity with the intention of developing how they look at the colonial archive, and what kinds of questions they might ask of it.

At the first session you said that you’d never really looked into the lives of young black people in London in the past. What did you find interesting about seeing those photographs?

Jordan: I have always had an interest in the history of the area I live in. We looked at a series of works entitled Lovers’ Rock by John Goto. It was interesting to learn that the subjects of the photographs were young people from a Youth Centre in South London. It helped me discover the fashion of young people around my age in that time period. I can now imagine myself in the 1970s!

In the second workshop the Art Assassins made collages that combined the imagery from the Autograph archives and the Northcote Thomas archive. How did the collage exercise try and address the difficulties of representation in the images?

Ali: The collage exercise was really great because you are forced in the making of the work to put different images into conversation. It also allows you to layer images on top of one another, to give them new ways of relating and new contexts to look at them. It was an activity that allowed the young people to tell their own story about these images and how they think we might start to view them. What was really interesting was how easy it was to start mistaking the Northcote Thomas images from the Autograph ones, once they had been creatively collaged. It showed how important a creative response is to telling new stories and thinking forward in the project, how this group of young people can rethink and reframe the Thomas archive to say something about our contemporary world.

Art Assassins at Autograph, collage
Art Assassins at Autograph, collage
Collages produced by members of the Art Assassins at a workshop at Autograph, combining images from the N. W. Thomas archives with Autograph collections.

Jordan, how did the collage exercise change the way you thought about the photos from the different archives? 

Jordan: The collaging exercise showed me a lot about he the contrast between the contents of the archives. Through college, I got to play with the images. Changing the symbolism of the photography was fun as we gave them new meanings.

Art Assassins at Autograph, reflecting on the collages
Discussing the Art Assassins’ collages at the Autograph workshop.

Find out more

You can read more about the Art Assassins’ project on the South London Gallery website or follow them on Instagram @slg_artassassins.

Join the Art Assassins

The Art Assassins welcomes new members. If you are aged 14-20 and able to meet regularly at our base in Peckham, South London, please join us! Drop us an email at [email protected]

Community outreach with the Art Assassins

Art Assassins visit to UCL Institute of Archaeology Conservation Labs
Members of the Art Assassins examine artefacts collected by Northcote Thomas during his anthropological surveys of Nigeria and Sierra Leone during a visit to UCL Institute of Archaeology Conservation Labs.

One of our objectives in the [Re:]Entanglements project is to reach out to a wide range of communities to explore the different values, meanings and possibilities they perceive in the archival traces of Northcote Thomas’s anthropological surveys. This includes people living in the towns and villages in which Thomas worked in Nigeria and Sierra Leone over a century ago, but also artists, activists, academics and others who identify with the groups Thomas studied in one way or another – regardless of where they live now.

We have recently begun a new collaboration funded by the UK’s National Lottery Heritage Fund with the Art Assassins – a youth forum based at the South London Gallery in Peckham. Peckham is a wonderfully diverse area of London, where there is a large British-Nigerian and Sierra Leonean community. The South London Gallery – or SLG, as it is now known – is a vibrant cultural hub. Its young people’s programme, which includes the Art Assassins and REcreative, who we shall also be working with, is especially inspiring.

South London Gallery, Fire Station Annexe
South London Gallery’s newly-opened ‘Fire Station’ annexe on Peckham Road, South East London. The Art Assassins will be curating an exhibition at the annexe in May 2020 based on their engagement with the archival traces of Northcote Thomas’s anthropological surveys.

This is the first of a regular series of blogs that members and coordinators of the Art Assassins will post as the project develops. The project will culminate in an exhibition based on their engagement with the Northcote Thomas archives and collections that the Art Assassins will curate in the SLG’s new Fire Station annexe in May 2020. Over to the Art Assassins…

The Art Assassins, South London Gallery

My name is Tommie Introna, and I have been working with the Art Assassins over the last two-and-a-half years. The Art Assassins is an ever-evolving group for young people aged between 14 and 20 years old that formed ten years ago at SLG. They work collaboratively with each other and with established artists and experts to create platforms that represent themselves and their ideas.

Over the coming months, we will be working with SOAS, UCL’s Museum Conservation programme, the Igbo Studies Initiative, Autograph ABP, two ‘researchers-in-residence’, Emmanuelle Andrews and Emma Dabiri, and artists including Onyeka Igwe and Rosa-Johan Uddoh to examine the archives and collections associated with Northcote Thomas’s anthropological surveys in Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The project will enable young people in South London to get an insight into the professional world of archives and museums as they engage with the photographs, sound recordings, artefacts, botanical specimens and texts relating to Thomas’s surverys. We will be visiting the institutions that care for them today, and explore other related collections, gaining insights into conservation practice, collections based research and curatorship.

SLG Art Assassins project participants
Some of the researchers and artists that the Art Assassins will be working with as they explore Thomas’s anthropological collections and archives. From left to right: Emmanuelle Andrews, Onyeka Igwe, Emma Dabiri and Rosa-Johan Uddoh.

Working with these anthropological archives and collections from the early twentieth century will provide an opportunity to explore colonial history in Britain and West Africa. This is an area that is neglected in the school curriculum, but central to the experiences of many communities living in South London today. We will be working with researchers and artists to explore how history can inform our understanding of our everyday lives and our collective futures.

Art Assassins visit to Horniman Museum with Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp
The Art Assassins are introduced to ethnography and ethnographic collecting during a visit to the new World Gallery at the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, South London. Curator, Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp, shows the group displays of brass plaques looted from the Oba’s Palace in Benin City during the British Punitive Expedition of 1897, opening up a discussion of the politics of colonial collections and current repatriation debates. Northcote Thomas spent several months in Benin City during his tour of Edo-speaking peoples in 1909-10, just 12 years after the Punitive Expedition.

The project has only recently begun, but already we have been very busy. We have been introduced to the field of ethnography and the history of ethnographic collecting during a visit to the Horniman Museum’s recently refurbished World Gallery. We have got to handle some of the artefacts collected by Thomas during his surveys and learnt about the process of museum conservation in a visit to the Conservation Labs at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology. We have had an initial meeting with Onyeka Igwe, the first of the artists with whom we will be working. And we have had several sessions now in which we have begun to discuss our initial ideas and plans for the project.

Art Assassins planning meeting, South London Gallery
Members of the Art Assassins share their initial ideas about the Northcote Thomas archives and collections in their regular meeting room at the South London Gallery’s Fire Station annexe.

We are really excited about the project and can’t wait to see what develops through the collaboration. We’ll be posting regular updates to the [Re:]Entanglements blog and you will also be able to follow our progress through Instagram.

The Art Assassins welcomes new members. If you are aged 14-20 and able to meet regularly at our base in Peckham, South London, please join us! Drop us an email at [email protected]

Tommie Introna, Young People’s Programme Coordinator, South London Gallery.