Transnational identity, historical entanglements and the living archive: between Medu & me
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The doors of culture shall be opened is an audio-visual exhibition and self-reflexive research project that unpacks transnational identity, historical entanglements, and the living archive, through Medu Art Ensemble as the case in point. The project expands on the relationship ‘between Medu and Me', as a method of engaging fragments of the archive, the construction of history, and identity formation across Botswana and South Africa. As the culmination of research and fieldwork in Gaborone and Cape Town from 2019 to 2021, the title of the exhibition references a Medu poster once housed in the University of Cape Town's Special Collections Library. The project aims to unpack and sound a space that centres dislocation, by providing some analysis of the post-traumas of Botswana in the anti-Apartheid struggle, with an emphasis on lived experiences, as well as oral traditions of storytelling and radio. The exhibition and accompanying research document work together to present creative and scholarly ideation of the relationship between art and history in contemporary Botswana and South Africa. With a look at history as circular and cyclical, the project uses a narrative tone in order to engage in an open dialogue with fragments of the archive. In this way, I map the interconnected timelines of individual and collective memory, using photography, sound, installation and sculpture (namely ceramics and assemblage). With a focus on Medu, I engage an extended conversation of Botswana's national history as entangled with aspects of South Africa's. By tracing a coming-of-age story of identity formation across neighbouring nation-states, I simultaneously unpack transnational identity through an exploration of the living archive. With a look at sound as spatialised and socialised, I reengage the interlocutors of history, as in circular motion with my individual present and collective future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".