The main argument

 Vidali & Phillips (2020) argue that experimental ethnographic installations reveal the multidimensional nature of archives that include such contrasting functions and attributes as centralizing/organizing, dynamic/interactive, and accessible/engaging. The authors demonstrate how ethnographic installations are “permanently in process of creation and dispersal with agency and materiality that simultaneously pull toward a centralized coherence and a decentred diversity” (p. 67). The authors propose that this multidimensional nature of archives is more complex than that assumed by the dualist opposition between organized collections and the “messy reality of collection, meaning, and rationality” (p. 68). Rather, Vidali & Philips (2020) emphasize that in archives there is “a multidimensional pull of various sources'' (p. 69). To explain this view, the authors use the concepts of centripetal force and centrifugal force as they were developed by the Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bachtin. The authors use Bachtin’s view of the living language as an “oscillation” between the centripetal forces of “standardization and normativity,” on the one hand, and the centrifugal forces of “everyday realities of linguistic diversity” (p. 69), on the other. In the context of ethnographic installations (archives or archiving as conceptualized by the authors), the centripetal forces are those of “coherence and stability” and the centrifugal forces are those of “unpredictability and variation” (p. 69).  Additionally, the authors emphasize that archives can be seen as entities that contain “multiple agencies” and relationalities, such as the “nonhuman agency” of materials, or the agency of speakers captured in recordings, or “relationality of collectors and speakers” (p. 70).