The Sound of Return: Authentic Voices Africa and the Quest for Displaced Heritage

High Priest of Sonic Shadows: 

‘’Since my first journey back home to Arua, West Nile, in 2016, my encounters with my aunties, uncles, and grandfather became a constant reminder of how disconnected I had become from my roots. The continuous cyphers around drums, and my engagements with both traditional and urban artists from these lands, further awakened something within me. Through these conversations, collaborations, and experiences, I began to understand that my DNA was deeply connected to these sounds, stories, movements, and cultural expressions—and that this connection continued to shape me spiritually, mentally, and emotionally.

The formation of Authentic Voices Africa (AVA) emerged from these experiences: a space where different generations could come together through conversations, collaborations, and shared experiences. A space where knowledge could move between generations, allowing everyone to contribute to the preservation and evolution of our cultural heritage while honoring our past, embracing our present, and shaping our future.

Since then, we have remained dedicated to safeguarding these stories through sound, movement, documentation, and archival practices. Our work seeks to preserve cultural traditions and also to honor their spiritual essence, ensuring that these living expressions are remembered, respected, embraced, and carried forward into the future.’’

In Africa, 90% of our historical art is held outside the continent. This structural gap—the distance between our creative goods and the infrastructure to engage with them—is not a passive condition. It is an active erasure, encountered whether you choose to confront it or not.

For Authentic Voices Africa (AVA), this gap is creative fuel. Deeply committed to safeguarding endangered music and intangible cultural heritage, AVA treats the tension between displacement and return as central to their artistic process. Their work is a practice of reclamation: creating public rituals, live experiences, and communal moments that transform loss into living memory.

Through collaborations with community cultural custodians, elders, chiefs, and musicians, AVA fuses indigenous music, ritual movement, ancestral sound, and storytelling with experimental hip-hop, tribal house, and Afro-futuristic electronic DJing. The result is not merely performance—it is intervention. Each set awakens ancestral memory and shapes new cultural frontiers, grounded in the social and political realities of everyday life, past and present.

So it is fitting that AVA has been selected for the AfriMuseum AfriMus 2026 Residency. A residency, by nature, is sustained dialogue—over time, across places, between people. This one will span West Nile and Brussels, bringing together artists, creatives, cultural custodians, and elders over the course of a year, with multiple public outcomes.

The project begins in West Nile. Conversations with Clan Leaders and observation of their ceremonies have defined its direction. But the resonance reaches far beyond.

In Brussels, AVA will encounter over 37,000 sound recordings, 20,000 photographs, and 9,000 musical instruments, alongside written archives documenting Central African musical traditions from the colonial period to the early 21st century. What does this mean? What meaning can we draw from a collection amassed by outsiders?

We start in West Nile to find out. Tracing the routes of the Bantu—the largest migration clan in the world—we look for similarities in words, statements, and sounds across tribes along the Nile River. Field recordings of the Maracha Lugbara and Bantu-speaking tribes offer reference points. Our methodology is sampling: loops, repetitions, and the search for commonalities that preserve cultural links across time and distance.

Our sound focus includes specific instruments in the archive for example the horn—how clans summoned deities and created direct communication lines through sound. We are intent to draw back meaning from loss.

Drawing inspiration from these archives, we see new possibilities for African electronic music: audiovisual work that connects archives through sound, links displaced spirits, and rebuilds the bridges new reclamations. 

About AVA:

Authentic Voices Africa (AVA) is a cultural, artistic, and evolutionary collective founded in 2020. At the heart of AVA’s work lies The Authentic Voices Africa Archive, a long-term initiative dedicated to safeguarding endangered music and intangible heritage of tribes.

Authentic Voices Africa participation in the AfriMus Residency is produced in association with Live Traces Producing and supported by the AfriMuseum in Belgium as part of the Museum’s first dedicated artistic residency programme with african electronic musicians and sound artists.  The residency is organised by the AfricaMuseum in Belgium in collaboration with Uganda’s Nyege Nyege and South Africa’s The Black Power Station.