Temporary Stored sensitively responds to historical archives whose sounds have been restored and made more accessible through digitalization, despite still being copyrighted and a property of European institutions. Adventuristiccapitalism, marked by the pathology of collecting by European scientists, anthropologists, naturalists, botanists, and historians, disrupted the biomes of the Global South, including the social, economic, and cultural systems that nourished the livelihoods of people living there. Such colonial exploits extended to audio recording practices that sought to listen, locate, and separate everyday practices for study and analysis. The arrival of the phonograph in Africa, along with its operators, disrupted the sonic and social fabric of societies. It altered traditional modes of transmission, leaving sounds deracinated and uprooted from their context. The project questions the tensions of this archival recording, temporarily stored in Western museums but silenced in catalogues.
“MR3,” a track featuring commentary from the Maasai people of Kenya, is woven with recordings of the Aka tribe in Cameroon. As the recordings are so ephemeral, there is an immediate becoming of their memories that the track depicts. An inhibiting uncertainty that allows one to linger with the sounds, like a passage, temporary but sticks in our ear memories, asking for repeated listenings. It is a sonic retort: a playback to history and its colonial processes of extraction and accumulation. A reminder that the labor of listening back is a continuous process of reassessing what has been lost, captured, and refused.
