This is an online portfolio of Mukhambira, in a website format.
At first sight, the visitor will be confronted with an unconventional, but very coherent and informative site. It is not accidental! It is a question of priority: GOLD AND WAX OR WAX AND GOLD? We are inviting everyone to think about this. It is our skepticism that we are expressing about the order of priorities. Our attempt to answer this question led us to break the rules of the established convention that, to us, seem to be GOLD AND WAX, in order to give way to new experiences, that will determine the survival of our knowledge systems and sciences as a whole!
How much of our life should we spend on our external beauty, at the expense of our internal values and beauty?
Dear visitor, we are not intending to distract or entertain you with shiny looks and glittering colours on this site, but to provide you with resourceful, relevant, and meaningful content, in its most natural way.
It is also a question of our philosophy regarding the coherence and pragmatics of our goals and methodologies. Let’s not be superfluous, when it comes to knowledge and science.
We have had various debates with people who think that "our Mukhambira website is not..., but should...", and we still stand our ground, and remark: They expected another flashy superfluous site, with contents are in the second plan, masked by colours and designs!
On this site, the content is in the first priority, and the looks are in the second or third plan. Old photos and videos, even those made unprofessionally, being unfocused, or cluttered, are honest testimonies of the realities that they represent and the condition in which they were ad. As documents, they attempt to transparently tell complete stories on their own, attempting to answer the questions: What? Who? Where? When? How?, whose answer is the foundations of knowledge.
Thus, I disagree with the idea of cleaning or sharpening photos in the studio, as it is like muting the buzzers on a mbira; or removing the background sound and audience coments from an ethnographic field recording. Let photos portray information with authenticity, without trying to beautify or distorting the reality. Cleaning ethnographic photos is faking reality, which is antiscientific.