Sonic interview with a burned loan card from the African Studies Library in Jagger

In 2021, FHYA’s Digital Archival Manager, Debra Pryor enrolled in the BA Honours in Curatorship programme at the Centre for Curating the Archive (CCA). The research assignment was to choose an object from any collection (formal or informal) and conduct an object study to surface research that would transform perception of the object and the spaces it comes from. The study was accompanied by an exhibition component.

Debra chose a loan card (at first thought to be an index card) retrieved from the burned site after the fire at the African Studies Library in the Jagger building, as her object for the assignment. Using Saidiya Hartman’s device of ‘Critical Fabulation’, she scripted a sonic interview with the loan card to ask questions about institutional systems of authority regarding the field of African Studies and some of its (controversial) history in the institution.

Debra used Google Translate’s audio function to give voice to the fabulated story of loan card BR 966.4003FORA in a 12 minute interview which was delivered in the anatomy lecture theatre to the course examiners in November 2021. When the card was asked if they were happy with the voice that had been chosen for them they replied: “No, I would have preferred one that spoke with an accent from Sierra Leone or at least close to the content I lived with, but even Google AI is Eurocentric, so I sound like this instead…British.”

The examiners were first required to fill out release forms agreeing to open access wherever possible before they were granted access to the interview. Reversed the usual power relations between institutional figures of authority and students/researchers this required the institutional figures to perform release rather than the usual requirement to observe restrictions that is placed on researchers.

The sonic interview was exhibited in the Of Smoke and Ash: The Jagger Library Memorial Exhibition at Michaelis Galleries (18 April - 14 May 2022) and will be available through their exhibition page on Ibali a little later this year. Debra, who registered as a Recognition of Prior Learning candidate based on her years of experience working in a research unit, obtained an Honours with distinction for the project and is pursuing an MPhil in Digital Curation this year through the Department of Knowledge and Information Stewardship (DKIS).