AZOLA / Somnyama Ngonyama is the title of the exhibition by South African photographers Zanele Muholi and Lindeka Qampi, the result of their residency in Sardinia and the workshop held at the MAN museum in December.
The project, curated by Emanuela Falqui, Erik Chevalier and Laura Farneti, consists of a selection of works focused on visual activism and the politics of self-representation, plus a new series of shots taken in Sardinia.
In continuity with the workshop and seminar activities promoted by MAN, the artists were invited to hold a photography workshop, in which various themes were addressed: from a community archive to a family story, to a self-portrait , up to the problems of the digital age, in a perspective of sharing oriented towards social responsibility.
Zanele Muholi has dedicated almost a decade of her life to documenting the visual identity of South Africa’s lesbian and transgender people, creating a voluminous body of more than 250 portraits, “Faces & Phases”, and with the declared intention of bringing to life to a “Map […], a visual history of black lesbians in South Africa after apartheid” to give the LGBTQI community an archive in which they can recognize themselves and rediscover their dignity. To work on homosexual identity, Muholi had to deal with the lack of a visual story that represented it and inserted his narrative into the broader framework of the formation of identities in South Africa, which includes the problem of racism, the of sexuality and colonialism.
His work continues in this direction with a new series of black and white self-portraits, entitled Somnyama Ngonyama (which means “Hail, Black Lioness”), in which her narrating body provocatively takes on race, class and gender stereotypes, interpreting different female archetypes. Once again the artist reworks his personal experience, his origins and transposes them into a collective and redeeming dimension with an aestheticizing and contradictory language, for example by constructing his character with makeshift clothing made of ornamental domestic objects or by emphasizing the color of his skin to reflect on the cliché of race; as she explains: “By exaggerating the blackness of my skin tone, I reclaim my blackness which I feel is continually enacted by the privileged other. My reality is that I don’t imitate black: it’s my skin and the experience of being black that are deeply rooted in me.” The goal is to create a new photographic archive on the politics of race and pigment. Some shots recall dramatic moments in the history of South Africa, such as the massacre of striking miners killed by the police in Marikana in 2012, Thulani I, Paris; others refer to the recent death of black citizens in the United States at the hands of law enforcement, MaID I, Syracuse: the white gloves in the photo are used by the police when they investigate the death of someone without wanting to leave a trace but in this case, for the artist, they hide their guilt.
Some photos are tributes to loved ones, such as the one dedicated to her mother, in which the artist wears the typical work tools of a maid, the profession that her mother did for more than 40 years.
The Somnyama Ngonyama series is enriched with new shots during the trips Muholi takes for work. Each image has precise references and contains symbolic elements that belong to different cultures and countries, to people or communities encountered; he relates these elements to his body and his identity.
During his residency in Sardinia, Muholi continued to work on self-portraits and added five images to his series.
The photographer is also currently working on another series of portraits with multiple identities, MaID (My Identity), which can also be read as maid , housekeeper. An autobiographical work in which the visual activist transforms her own body into an art subject with which she encourages photographers and women to pay attention to the many substances they are made of, to heal, before venturing into the spheres of other individuals.
Lindeka Qampi met Zanele Muholi in 2006 within the Iliso Labantu collective, of which she is a member: a group of photographers from the townships who document contemporary urban life. David Goldblatt wrote for them: “apartheid is no more, but gaps remain in the social fabric, in our experience and in the mutual understanding of our lives. Iliso Labantu can make a significant contribution to reducing these shortcomings.”
Lindeka Qampi she began her career as a self-taught photographer, creating postcards for tourists about life in the townships around Cape Town where she will exhibit for the first time in 2010. She continues as a street photographer with a series developed over the course of 10 years and still in progress, Daily Lives . Originally from those places, the artist dissects from the inside all those visual aspects linked to the most common gestures, to the confined space which was the most explicit sign of apartheid and which has designed the form of living even today, to the diversity of cultures , to people’s creativity, to cultural norms, to the value of a shared history. His photos go beyond the Western pietistic vision of the third world and make the daily gesture reappear as a political gesture capable of living the present, transforming it or at least dreaming about it. Another series, Living in this World , tells the story of the life of young people from the suburbs who grew up with absent fathers.
In 2015 Qampi turns the lens on itself. Azola , his latest work, is part of a larger body entitled Inside My Heart , which tells familiar, often painful stories. In Azola reworks a universal female trauma through a personal story of violence, rape, often accompanied by silence, repression and loneliness. Her dream language seeks its roots in the subconscious, in an atavistic world, to rediscover the bowels of the earth and heal an incurable wound with a liberating cry, to definitively break her silence but also that of many other women. To tell his story Qampi involved his family; her daughter Azola represents her experience of violence as a child; the husband and brother symbolize male aggression, while the women accompany his pain. Qampi also worked in Sardinia producing new images for this story in which he portrays himself continuing his inner journey.
For several years Zanele Muholi and Lindeka Qampi have been collaborating on training projects to encourage anyone to use the photographic medium and the image as tools of emancipation.
In 2014 the photography laboratory “Photo XP. The 2014 XP, Siyafundisana”, which means “sharing one’s knowledge”, took place in Soweto, one of the largest townships in South Africa which has historically played an important role in the fight against apartheid. The course was aimed at young girls from a school to encourage them to talk about themselves and work on their environment. The latest project in 2015 “Visual Activism Cultural Exchange Project (VACEP)” took place in Europe, in Oslo, and involved not only local artists but also asylum seekers, African migrants currently in Europe.
The workshop was attended by: Leonardo Boscani / Lucia Cadeddu / Emanuela Cau / Franco Casu / Giulia Casula / Alessandra Cridar / Chiara Coppola / Francesca Corriga / Rita Delogu / Simone Loi / Moju Manuli / Antonio Mannu / Katia Marroccu / Melania Massa / Michela Mereu / Veronica Muntoni / Stefania Muresu / Gigi Murru / Medea Laura Pace / Cristina Pia / Stefano Pia / Anna Zurru
The project was carried out thanks to the collaboration with the Department of Social Sciences and Institutions and with that of History, Cultural Heritage and Territory of the University of Cagliari.
The exhibition is sponsored by QSS Europa, Stampa
