Discos Fuentes According to Foucault: An Archive Problem

Abstract

Discos Fuentes is the most important record company in the history of music production in Colombia. It holds the largest collection of phonorecords produced in the country. These sound recordings have been an essential part of the soundscape of Colombia and Latin America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But a catalogue raisonné does not exist for this collection. Before undertaking the creation of one, it is important to realize the implications that an archive of this kind might have upon the history of music. This paper examines Michel Foucault’s idea of archive and applies it to the Discos Fuentes collection. It is not an easy task, because Foucault rarely dealt with concrete cases of study in his writing nor with sound as a record. The preliminary results are encouraging in this regard and promise to serve as a critical foundation for the development of the catalog.