“Dying Songs” Archive

Dying Songs is a long-term documentary and archival project dedicated to recording disappearing folk songs, dances, and oral traditions in remote and depopulating rural communities around the world. The project seeks to preserve living cultural heritage at the moment when it is most vulnerable - not as museum objects, but as expressions of identity, memory, and collective experience.

The initiative begins in Lithuania, where I have already documented elders and tradition-bearers in rural regions. These first recordings form the foundation of a growing archive and establish the project’s methodology: slow fieldwork, close listening, and collaboration based on respect, empathy, and presence. Rather than approaching communities from academic distance, Dying Songs builds personal relationships, acknowledging those who carry these traditions as cultural custodians in their own right.

Many rural communities globally face similar pressures. Migration, population decline, industrial agriculture, and the restructuring of rural economies mean that songs once transmitted orally for generations may now disappear within a single lifetime. The project responds to this moment, working to document and preserve oral heritage in situ before its transmission chain is broken.

Using photography, field sound recording, film, and written reflection, Dying Songs builds an evolving archive that is both artistic and ethnographic. While beginning in Lithuania, the project is designed to expand across regional and national borders, connecting endangered rural musical traditions from different parts of the world into a shared historical moment: the global disappearance of oral cultural memory.

The core question the project asks is simple yet urgent:
What is lost when a song is no longer sung?

By recording these voices now - directly, respectfully, and with context - Dying Songs works to ensure that something of this memory remains accessible to future communities, researchers, and cultural institutions, even if the living tradition itself fades.

2025, Barbora Jamantaite