Archives have always been framed in a guise that promotes a Western perspective of representations of the Other, a modernity in which the institutions and museums frame these archives and collections. These ways of representing the artifacts, tangible or intangible, problematize the mode in which the knowledge or histories of the peoples are communicated. Most African traditions are passed through apprenticeship and other oral traditions, usually put out of context and reconfigured in a Eurocentric dimension. Written sources in the West are deemed ontologically concrete and immune to individual distortion, whereas oral sources seem nebulous and subjectively constituted. An ongoing extraction of cultural property has occurred in colonies outside Europe, leading to the objectification of artifacts, humans, tools, sounds, and instruments. This harboring of objects in museums and institutions is unethical and problematic as the so-called ‘objects’ are not considered objects in Africa. They are historical carriers, spiritual beings, and cultural entities passed on from generation to generation, and they reflect past and future histories. However, these histories are not accessible to those who now own them and who have created their own imagined version of past histories. The occident has accumulated most of these archives and continuously reproduces a colonial pattern in this discourse. 

Temporary Stored is a repatriation project which questions the significance of sound archives in museums. Using selected sounds from an archive from the Sound Archive of Royal Museum of Central Africa, a fixed media piece is developed, re-contextualizing what the archived sounds reveal about the cultural heritage of countries in East and Central Africa. The piece focuses on narratives through different sounds from the archive, field recordings, and synthesizers, reconfiguring ways of thinking sonically through recorded pasts and futures.