Home is Enveloping Me...
By Sana Ginwalla.
Having started Everyday Lusaka in March 2018, I had spent most of the year exploring Lusaka in a language I knew best, with the observant tool I never tire of using – my camera. My eyes had become accustomed to seeing Lusaka through the photographs I made of it. At home, in town, on walks, with friends. The city and I tangoed together. It told me stories about itself while I learnt about my own. The warm afternoons spent loafing around on quiet and busy roads with a camera around my neck would attract a kind of suspicious attention that I was never previously familiar with. Still, it was not usually people my camera was gravitating towards; it was the banal corners and shadows that – like parts of my identity and mind – my eyes never glanced towards before.
However, having started an Honours in Curatorship at the University of Cape Town in January 2019, my dance with Lusaka’s shadows was put on hold. I had instead begun tending to my love and obsession for the city through other people’s previous imaginations of it. Discarded, damaged, found, lost, uncollected, old and faded – photographs and memories that weren’t mine filled my time.
For most of us, these treasured memories are held close – often in the pocket of our wallets, framed on our living room walls, or kept in a photo box somewhere in our homes. However, in this case, the photographs were found somewhere far away from those who recorded them. They were scattered between rusted steel boxes, wrinkled envelopes, and dusty cardboard boxes in the attic of Fine Art Studios on Chachacha Road. And yet each torn paper, damaged photograph, and dusty negative I’d found had a priceless value in tracing a sketch of the city’s intimate and unseen histories.
My first ever visit to Fine Art Studios was in July 2018 to buy some film camera batteries. When I entered, what I saw on display eventually drew me to visit their attic months later. In the glass cabinets of this studio turned stationery and office goods store, were portraits of people, hairstyles and fashions long gone. The works of renowned photographers like Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keita immediately came to mind. I was ecstatic to see that Zambia had its own collection of similar images. Seeing how light-damaged the photographs already were and recognising the value in them, I wanted to preserve these rarities by locating the negatives or at least scanning the prints. I had no idea what I was going to do with them, for whom, or what.
After building a relationship with the studio over several months, I made arrangements to see their attic to potentially purchase any old cameras or photographs that I found. Crouched down on that warm Sunday afternoon in October 2018 – under the single tungsten bulb that lit dusty shelves and boxes – around 600 negatives, slides, and prints were unearthed. Some of the negatives were water damaged, scratched, or bitten, while others were enclosed in crumpled envelopes or wrapped in discoloured papers.
As the dust on my fingers thickened, the neglection of these photographs became more apparent. There were black and white negatives, prints of formal and stoic-looking studio photos. Colour slides revealed candid images of families who were able to record their own memories - at parties and on holiday - outlining the disparities that exist between social classes even in memory making. Others, though wrapped in torn invoices and held together by worn out rubber bands, were found in their orange Kodak slide boxes, safe from all the heat and dust of the attic. Despite the condition and context in which these items were found, there was something gripping about them all.
Being a miner of memory myself, I’m far too familiar with that insatiable longing of the past – to a time when I rocked the mushroom cut and didn’t know a thing about the world, or when I wasn’t born yet and my father had all his dark hairs, or when his father still had teeth. I would (and still) sometimes spend hours satisfying my yearning by looking at old family pictures.
My dad was a keen photographer. Not only did he document all the key moments of our lives growing up, he also meticulously scanned many of the prints. Our box of photographs (that I once spent an afternoon reorganising and labelling when I was 13) is one that has played a critical role in helping me understand myself and my heritage. All those IB Theory of Knowledge tropes come to mind: how do we know what we know? Who am I and where do I come from? Why are things the way they are? What led us here and how has that shaped who we are today?
When seeing those photographs in the attic of that studio, uncollected and forgotten by their rightful owners, there was a sense of a disconnected or second-hand nostalgia. An understanding of what might’ve been felt if those in the photographs were to see the images years later. If I cherished my own family photographs so much, and if they had played such a key role in developing my understanding of my own family history, how could such memories possibly be left to perish? How could I possibly prevent that from happening for someone else’s found belongings?
I collected the photographs in October 2018, around the same time that I was applying for the Curatorship program at UCT. My research proposal centred around the collection. By early 2019, I was in Cape Town working to have the collection digitised to facilitate an online repatriation of the found photographs. A selection of the photos was later exhibited (virtually and physically) and written on for my thesis entitled The Studio Stool.
Throughout the year, I worked on The Studio Stool in a way that allowed it the space and capacity to become much more than just a project that existed in an academic context. Today, it is built as a digital photographic social history archive that exists to “document the lesser-known histories of Zambia, one that decentres itself from the state archives.” While the Fine Art Studios collection inaugurated the archive, there are around 600 more photographs that have been digitally collected since 2018. The archive can grow with contributions from anyone in the community with images from Zambia that won’t otherwise find a home in the institutional archives. The Studio Stool is here to provide an alternative vision of Zambia that we have yet to recognise as writers, historians, artists, or archivists.
If it isn’t obvious enough, I’m a lover of memories even when they’re not mine. For me, the thing that facilitated this love was that box of photographs containing memories that my family was fortunate enough to have, documented and preserved for so long. The photographs in The Studio Stool collection are reminiscent of memories that are not mine, in a country that isn’t quite mine either. It just so happened that while my love for Lusaka began to grow through my own documentation of it, I came to encounter past documentations of it too. Now, my love of memory and my love for Lusaka tango with one another. They tell us stories about them while we learn about ours.
To read more from Sana, visit her blog here.
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