Shifts and Expedients: The Underlife, Afterlife and Digital Life of a Gourd

This paper examines mukombe, a beer ladle made from a gourd, collected c.1858 in present-day Zimbabwe by the artist-colonist Thomas Baines and now held in the Economic Botany Collection at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London. Once a convivial vessel, mukombe was absorbed into imperial taxonomic regimes and and accessioned as a specimen and metadata. Drawing on Harry Garuba’s animist materialism, Clapperton Mavhunga’s account of vaShona technicity, and N. Katherine Hayles’ theory of threshold effects, we argue that the digitised beer ladle functions as a non-modern historiographic device. We introduce the concept of underlife—the ongoing relational vitality of objects that persists beneath archival classification—to show how mukombe exceeds both colonial capture and digital containment. By contrast, afterlife denotes sequential survival, while digital versioning represents a third register: a conjunctural rearticulation that enacts mukombe’s underlife within computational and networked media. Through skeuomorphic residues, digital versioning, and art-based reactivation in Shifts and Expedients (2023–ongoing), mukombe participates in what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls “two concurrent presents,” unsettling the epistemic categories that sustain modernity’s authority over time, matter, and life. Digitisation emerges here not as preservation but as a contested threshold where governance, access, and relational survival intersect. This chapter works at the intersection of non-modern historiography and decolonial archive critique, drawing on STS and material culture theory while proceeding through art-based practice research.

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