As a scholar-archivist and archivist-scholar, Dr Lizabé Lambrechts works across a variety of domains, including heritage preservation, academic research and public interest projects. Lambrechts is a post-doctoral research fellow at the African Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation at SU and the project leader of the Hidden Years Music Archive, one of the biggest popular music archives in South Africa.
Her work is essentially concerned with approaches to the archive that allow historical narratives to emerge while respecting individual memory and agency. This line of thinking is directed towards smaller, particular narratives of individuals, activities, concerts and creative endeavours that could contradict larger historical assumptions and patterns.
Lambrechts explored this in various publications, including a forthcoming article, “They called me the 'Ag Pleez Deddy' man: On the be(longing) of Jeremy Taylor," to be published in SAMUS: South African Music Studies (2020). At the same time, her work recognises that archival work could replicate existing historical antinomies and categories, and she critically engages with archival practices in articles such as “Performing the Aporias of the Archive: Towards a Future for South African Music Archives,"published in Historia in 2016.
Her current research project is entitled “Music and memory: Discovering the post-apartheid era through popular music archives" (2018 – 2021). This project is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and hosted by the Africa Open Institute in collaboration with the British Library and Sound Archive, and the School for Oriental and African Studies of the University of London.
Lambrechts' work allows her the freedom and creativity to collaborate with scholars, musicians, artists and curators across multiple disciplines in projects such as the collaborative exhibition Landscapes of Loss: Curatorial Mapping and the Use of Archival Sound Recordings (2018) and public sonic events such as The Hidden Archives Vinyl Listening Sessions (2019).
* This article featured in the latest edition of Stellenbosch University (SU)'s multi-award winning publication Research at Stellenbosch University . Produced annually by SU's Division for Research Development (DRD), this flagship publication offers the national and international research community as well as other interested parties a comprehensive, yet accessible overview of innovative and interesting research being done at the institution.The theme of the edition is Research for Impact which is one of SU's core strategic themes from its Vision 2040 and Strategic Framework 2019–2024.
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