How to do music with images: photography as a way of remembering, authorizing and materializing the musical heritage

Abstract

This work tries to explore how the use of photography can help map and rebuild the musical heritage of a community thus reversing the apparent static condition of a snapshot image. During the fieldwork that I developed between 2010 and 2012, with the Goan community settled in Catembe (Mozambique), photography has been an important element as a mediator in my relationship with Goans as well as a way of understanding issues often missing in oral discourse. Photography was, frequently, the starting point for descriptions of musical practices, festivals and rituals in which Goans participate or have participated in the past. I argue that photography could be a way of remembering, empower and materialize musical heritage in the context of migrant communities when the condition of deterritorialization fragilize ties with the past and with the place of origin. In this case photography can constitute a device, in the Foucault’s (2008) perspective, in providing means of memory restoration which, in this case, is transformed in music.