There was a time, not too long ago, when your voice didn\u2019t fly through the air in a second. It had to be recorded \u2014 carefully, lovingly \u2014 on a cassette tape. Then it would travel by mail, across borders and oceans, to reach the ears of someone waiting.<\/p>\n
Those tapes, filled with stories, songs, jokes, and longing, are the heart of a new initiative launched by the Sharjah Art Foundation. Called \u201cArchival Cassette Correspondence,\u201d<\/em> the project is a quiet tribute to a lost form of communication \u2014 one that meant everything to families who couldn\u2019t be in the same place.<\/p>\n In the days before WhatsApp and Zoom calls, cassette tapes served as emotional lifelines, especially for people who had left their home countries for work or study. You\u2019d sit in a quiet room, press \u201crecord,\u201d and talk \u2014 maybe about your day, maybe just to hear your own voice reaching someone far away.<\/p>\n The Foundation is now asking people across the UAE to look in their drawers, closets, and shoeboxes \u2014 and see if they have any of these forgotten treasures. They’re collecting tapes recorded between 1970 and 2000, particularly those with personal messages exchanged between residents of the Emirates and their loved ones.<\/p>\n All languages are welcome. Arabic, Urdu, Malayalam, Tagalog the Foundation sees value in every voice, every dialect, every emotion frozen in time.<\/p>\n What\u2019s especially touching is that these aren\u2019t polished recordings. Many are raw, crackling, full of background noise \u2014 kids laughing, TVs humming, doors opening. But that\u2019s exactly what makes them powerful. They aren\u2019t just sounds \u2014 they\u2019re memories.<\/p>\n The project isn\u2019t about nostalgia for the sake of it. It\u2019s about capturing something real \u2014 a slice of everyday life that tells us how people stayed close when the world was far apart.<\/p>\n If you\u2019ve got an old cassette stashed away, you might just be holding a piece of history. And now, there\u2019s a place for it to be heard again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sharjah Art Foundation is collecting old cassette recordings in a bid to preserve personal audio messages that once connected families and friends across the UAE and beyond.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":12674,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english-stories"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uaehumanjourney.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uaehumanjourney.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uaehumanjourney.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uaehumanjourney.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uaehumanjourney.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12673"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uaehumanjourney.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12675,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uaehumanjourney.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12673\/revisions\/12675"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uaehumanjourney.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uaehumanjourney.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uaehumanjourney.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uaehumanjourney.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}