Hello, My name is Hannah Turner and I'm
an Assistant Professor at
the School of Information at
the University of British Columbia.
And I'm coming to you from the ancestral,
traditional and unceded territory of the Musqueam people.
Hello, my name is Laura Gibson and I'm a lecturer
in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College
London University in the UK.
Hello, my name is Clara Gimenez-Delgado and
I'm a recent graduate of
the School of Information at
the University of British Columbia.
I'm speaking to you today from the
traditional ancestral and
unceded territories of the Musqueam,
the Squamish, and the Tsleil-Waututh Nations.
Today we'd like to talk to you
about this collaborative design project,
which is based on research funding,
called Amagugu Ethu/Our Treasures,
understanding Zulu history and language
with Zulu-speaking communities and their belongings.
Amagugu Ethu and the
collaboration on the Museum in a Box first began
during my PhD research on
decolonizing cultural heritage in the digital age.
Posed with a challenge that
arose in KwaZulu-Natal to
connect Zulu knowledge to
objects and treasures in the Cape Town museum,
we explored the possibility of collecting
images and stories about objects in Iziko
and bringing these back to KwaZulu-Natal.
This practise of reconnecting stories with
treasures can often present an opportunity
or starting points when considering
the return of heritage or knowledge.
So, in April 2019,
a group of 19 Zulu community experts,
anthropologists, scholars,
entrepreneurs, and museum professionals,
convened at the Iziko Museums
to conduct a three-day encounter with
belongings classified as Zulu
by the former South African Museum,
now part of the Iziko network.
These included beer-drinking vessels,
head dresses, ear plugs,
snuff spoons, spears, beadwork,
medicine containers and more.
As well as fostering connections between
originating community members and their belongings,
the various workshop encounters
disrupted colonial style narratives
about the collection
by challenging museum naming, classifying,
cataloguing, conserving, and storing practises.
Working with the company Museum in
a Box we envisaged a process
to use this tool to collect and exhibit stories about
these objects that reside now in the Iziko collections.
The Box itself, seen here, is
a small simple audio player that can play back
sound recordings from the central database
with a physical prompt;
in this case, image postcards with
small RFID stickers attached.
It's a very simple,
intuitive, and easy to use device.
Collecting the stories and engaging
the Zulu partners with
the Iziko collections was an attempt to
remove the authority of the institution, to counter
the National Archive, and populate
this device with Zulu knowledge and stories.
One of these boxes is now installed at
the Luthuli Museum, a National Heritage Centre
in KwaZulu-Natal.
This mobile, low-barrier device gives
local staff a resource now to
use in educating local school groups and
children and other community members,
thereby further dispersing archival authority.
We situate this project, the collaborative building of
an oral history collection and documentation project,
in what might be called design-based
or arts-based participatory design.
We also situate it in
a long history of community archives and
museum documentation projects that
has spanned decades, both within
South Africa and across the world.
Since 2019, we've begun developing
a project specific database, which you'll soon hear about,
and this is complete with metadata
and object descriptions that had been compiled from
our research in the collections
from this three-day workshop.
The stories and knowledges that
filled the collections rooms and
our lunchtime conversations were
documented and reintegrated into this online archives.
We build object descriptions that will
be sent back to the Museum in the hope
that they can incorporate some of the suggestions
and information into some of these sparse records.
We imagine this project as a design project,
in a sense used by participatory designers
in that we built an interactive educational resource
for sharing stories about objects.
But we also conceive of this
as something we built together.
It is not wholly archival or preservative.
In Hennessy and Smith's definition
of the word anarchival,
the documentation project specifically
rejects the desire for preservation
in perpetuity and is
associated outside of the institution,
in this case, Museum.
In this case, it exists in the realm of
public education and arts-based practise,
from clay making workshops, for example,
and exercises, and the storytelling performances
and sessions that were included as part of the workshop,
to the inclusion of stories about objects,
rather than descriptions of objects.
The shared design is shared in
the practicalities and practises of making,
moving and telling throughout the three-day workshop.
Incorporating these kinds of
alternative modes of description or storytelling,
we argue, were necessary parts of
the participatory design process.
We conclude our paper
by questioning what obligations were
forged in this participatory design process
and consider the obligations or other kinds of counter
archival museum practises. As "hungry academics,"
What have we extracted and what
are our obligations because of this?
I'm going to show you some of the design and
description choices we made for
the Amagugu Ethu project website.
And the first one you can see on
the landing page is a thank you note to our guests,
to our visitors for being respectful guests.
After that, we can move over a vertical menu,
which layout was designed to be most accessible
from mobile devices that are
mostly used by the community itself.
And in that menu you can access
different parts of the project.
If we visit the collection page,
there are two main content pages.
On the second one, you can
learn more about how the collection
was described on Catalogue.
And that was done with the
community defined categories,
others from Cataloguing Cultural Objects
standards for heritage institution,
and some concepts from the archival world.
However, because we changed the name of the category,
we are displaying on
this table the name of the category that we chose,
where does it come from, and it's name,
and standard, if applicable.
If we go back to the Collection page and we
enter the archives of the collection,
you can see that each of
the belongings have been displayed
side-by-side with their photo and name in isiZulu.
And if we go into one of them specifically,
we have displayed the belonging name in
isiZulu and it's cataloguing number for the South African,
Museum, if available,
if known, it's photo,
the pronunciation of the belonging in
in isiZulu by a member of the community, Thandi Nxumalo.
"Impepho"
The different categories describe.
And at the end, if available,
if it was made,
there's also a link to
the Museum in a Box vault where visitors
can access the card that was made for
the Museum in a Box. So that would
include the image of the
card and the recording that will
play whenever the card is put on top of the box.
This work has also raised a question for us as
researchers. In making something
together and producing intangible
affect, how can we also produce something other
than or against institutional archives?
We posit that the work done to the process of
creating the Amagugu Ethu resource,
both the website and the Museum in a Box tool,
demonstrate a kind of what Springer has
called anarchival responsibility,
which requires a willingness to
respond and some kind of collective action.
The transformation from one form to
another and the movement through
different states of being in
the archive is a key focus of Kate Hennessy and
Trudy Smith's work on anarchival materiality.
They conceptualise this destabilisation
as a kind of generative entropic force.
They call to attention the precarity of
the archive as an institution and
objects that resist the archival force
to preserve deemed fugitives.
Thinking through this destabilisation
and the movement of objects outside of
the museum context in the Amagugu Ethu
project has likewise been a generative force.
And the stories produced by
the participants continue to be replayed
at a new locale far away from
the confines of the Museum in Cape Town.
It is this movement or generative entropy that we see as
valuable and that came directly from
the participatory design process noted here.
Designing for the counter archive, we found, required
the incorporation of non-traditional aspects of museum
and archival work, like performance and artistic reproduction.
While the small ,nondescript storytelling machine,
the Museum in a Box,
is an effort to produce something
useful for a particular setting,
about a particular collection,
it has exceeded our expectations,
and we hope it provides some insights into the kinds of
work that can be done beyond institutional repositories.
It allowed us to encapsulate
the community experts' insights into the collection
into a portable object that not only acts
as a counter narrative and anarchival instrument,
but also allows for those
belongings and their stories to break free of
institutional constraints and potentially inspire
new narratives and storytelling wherever they go.