"The real danger is not knowing what we don't know"

Brenton Maart, website Archive & Public Culture Research Initiative (Gazette), 26 July 2012. Quoted: Mirjam de Bruijn & Walter Nkwi, Archives Conference Codesria/Berkeley/ASC.

It is especially in its capacity to subvert the tropes of ethnography that performance is central in enacting, and understanding, the conversations that arise through the Diaspora. Mirjam de Bruijn (African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands), in her report on the research by Walter Gam Nkwi (University of Buea, Cameroon), titled The status of Memory in Family Photo Albums in the Bamenda Grassfields of Cameroon, described how personal photographic archives were transformed through nuanced, sensitive reading and mediation via the making of a film into an analysis of the aspirations of mobility. Of the range of curatorial methodologies applied here, one of the more powerful was the role of affect in creating new readings, meanings and understandings. Of special interest was the manner in which the research directed a possible future for the physical object, a future that continues to define a path quite different to that of the digital highway.