1. Introduction: Remembered and Forgotten

In June 2012 (Charlton 2012, personal communication1), a scroll by the artist Dumile Feni was donated to a university museum, the Wits Art Museum (WAM), in Johannesburg. The scroll had not been exhibited during Feni’s lifetime (Manganyi 2012: 21). As such, it’s unclear how (or whether) the artist intended for it to be shown. That said, the scroll includes a number of inscriptions—such as, ‘This composition is not meant to be a fucking poem,’ and ‘Your education does not allow you to understand the statement. You wouldn’t know’—that suggest he created the work with an audience in mind, and was wary of how this audience might interpret his work.

The emphasis Feni placed upon how (or how not) to read his work has prompted, for me, a number of ethical questions about the scroll’s subsequent exhibition, in particular at Activate/Captivate (2016) at WAM, where a parallel display was created to offer researchers, students, secondary school learners, and members of the public (De Becker and Nettleton 2015: XI) an opportunity to interact with a digitized version of the work. This version was projected onto a wall in a blacked-out cubicle. By moving their hand across a sensor, visitors could ‘scroll’ left or right ‘through’ it. The display attempted to simulate the experience of ‘handling’ the work, without putting the fragile, material scroll at risk (Leyde 2019, personal communication). Visitors could also view the original in a vitrine that was installed near the entrance to the cubicle that housed the digital version. This parallel display of the material and digital objects allowed for visual comparisons to be drawn, yet without being able to handle the physical object, researchers were unable to get a sense of the work’s tactility and the layers of meaning embedded therein.

Given the possibility that the digital will outlive the material, and given how unlikely it is that future researchers will be able to physically handle the work (Leyde 2019, personal communication), an important question arises as to how best to preserve the scroll’s material and mechanical idiosyncrasies. The work of the scholar Peter Botticelli (2015) is of particular relevance here; he highlights the need for curators to ‘examine closely the potential for digital objects to represent, and possibly distort, the authentic information contained in material objects’ (p. 123). Botticelli (2015) notes the importance of ‘extensive documentation’ that might allow for ‘detailed comparisons’ between the material and digital, thereby minimizing ‘the risk of information loss through successive waves of technology obsolescence’ (p. 124).

With the digitization of Feni’s scroll, this task is complicated by the fact that much information has either already been lost or is otherwise speculative. This is an important consideration because, as Fiona Cameron (cit. in Botticelli 2015) notes, the digitization of art ‘enacts the curatorial process of selection of what is significant, what should be remembered and forgotten, and what categories of meaning, such as classification, cultural values, or aesthetic attributes are given pre-eminence’ (p. 131). When the early life of an object has not been well documented, its maker is no longer around, or conflicting perspectives exist as to the maker’s intent, how do curators choose what to prioritize?