In the general context of ethnographic work beyond archiving, Vidali (in Vidali & Phillips, 2020) describes the “ambivalence and paradox” in the relationship between ethnographic material collections and their fieldwork (p. 71). Vidali describes her struggle to reconcile these paradoxes in her own work, as well as other dilemmas inherent in ethnographic research, such as “ethical dimensions of consent, respect, ownership, stewardship, legacy, and propriety” (p. 71). The author explains that ethnographers have to grapple with an “uncomfortable form of power” inherent in the process of collecting and capturing research materials, as a process of separating these materials from their context. From “a decolonizing perspective [this process] is considered a potential violation and violence” (p. 71).
During her work in Zambia between 1986 and 1990, the author collected over 150 hours of audio-recorded materials, in work on the social and cultural impact of Zambia radio broadcasting in the Bemba language. In 2014, the author had an opportunity to give back to the community that originally supported her research by creating the Bemba online project. The project included streaming audio excerpts from the author's research materials and also unique materials on Zambia’s famous and influential radio personality, David Yumba, creator and producer of Bemba-language program Kabusha Takolelwe Bowa.
Later on, Vidali & Phillips had the idea of recreating an old Zambian radio show by using recordings of David Yumba’a answers to listeners’ questions. In the recreation, recorded materials were mixed with questions from members of the Bemba Online Project, together with clips, announcements, advertisements, and Christian hymns from the original program. The digital product of the remix, called the “Kabusha Radio Remix,” was transferred to the original media of analog audio cassette tape.
The authors then developed this project into a multimedia interactive physical installation, where visitors could listen to the recreated show “in a space that recalls what it might have been like to listen to the radio program during its original run, echoing 1980s Zambia and harkening back to an analog past, thus remixing sound, time, people, and space” (p. 77).
Vidal explains that she integrated her own vision into the mixed project, just as she included questions about problems of archive workers of the Bemba Online Project into fictional letters created for the remixed version of the program. Vidal describes this process as “analogous to the way that other artists have creatively engaged with archives to reveal or create new relations with material otherwise seen as static objects in the past” (p. 77).
As the project was installed in different locations, it opened up to additional levels of engagement with viewers and listeners. In conclusion, Vidali & Phillips describe one direction for the future development of this project, in which a typical room of that period is recreated as part of their installation.
Vidali & Phillips (2020) argue that experimental ethnographic installations reveal the multidimensional nature of archives that include such contrasting functions and attributes as centralizing/organizing, dynamic/interactive, and accessible/engaging. The authors demonstrate how ethnographic installations are “permanently in process of creation and dispersal with agency and materiality that simultaneously pull toward a centralized coherence and a decentred diversity” (p. 67).
The authors propose that this multidimensional nature of archives is more complex than that assumed by the dualist opposition between organized collections and the “messy reality of collection, meaning, and rationality” (p. 68). Rather, Vidali & Philips (2020) emphasize that in archives there is “a multidimensional pull of various sources'' (p. 69). To explain this view, the authors use the concepts of centripetal force and centrifugal force as they were developed by the Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bachtin. The authors use Bachtin’s view of the living language as an “oscillation” between the centripetal forces of “standardization and normativity,” on the one hand, and the centrifugal forces of “everyday realities of linguistic diversity” (p. 69), on the other. In the context of ethnographic installations (archives or archiving as conceptualized by the authors), the centripetal forces are those of “coherence and stability” and the centrifugal forces are those of “unpredictability and variation” (p. 69).
Additionally, the authors emphasize that archives can be seen as entities that contain “multiple agencies” and relationalities, such as the “nonhuman agency” of materials, or the agency of speakers captured in recordings, or “relationality of collectors and speakers” (p. 70).