Nii Obodai - Pippa Hetherington

Moderated by Julie Bonzon, 15 September 2020

JB: Looking at both of your works, Pippa's series 'Cuttings' and Nii's 'Who Knows Tomorrow', I was very interested in the idea of memory in photography, especially the relationship between photography and place. How do you engage with these subjects?

NO: 'Who Knows Tomorrow' is a therapeutic work that I did after my father passed away and is connected to one of the last conversations I had with him. I interviewed him a few times before he passed about his role in Ghana's independence, about how he felt about the legacy, the outcome, and where we are today in terms of their vision. He was quite disappointed. They were overthrown after having established a democratic government. The last thing I want to do is to be overtly political; I am not a flag-waver. To express some of these conversations and this inheritance, I tried to find ways to deal with history, my family, politics, and my own lineage coming from a political family. I realised that I could do it through the landscape. The history of Ghana is written in the landscape; it is right there: the locations where the events took place are there, and the monuments are there. It is about connecting with these places, learning how to read the story through the environment and the land. That was a big moment for me. At the time, I was travelling with Bruno Boudjelal, a French-Algerian photographer. It was interesting to talk about Algerian independence with him and to hear about the experiences he had in both places, France and Algeria. Our perspective in Ghana was completely different, even though we were standing side by side and photographing the same places. It pushed me to realise that there was a missing link in my practice as an evolving photographer: not seeing enough of the landscape as a discursive element in photography. Growing up in Ghana, the stories and mythologies I had about Africa were based on traditional spirituality and the relationship that spirituality has with the land. It is very different from living in Britain, where Christianity has its spirituality based in a place that is intangible to us, called ‘Heaven’. I learned that our spiritual deities in Africa were Earth-based. You can communicate with them through the Earth or through elements that come out of the Earth, such as food, animals, and trees. This experience started building up in me, leading me to think about the landscape as a memory bank. The history of the Earth is right there.

PH: I think that when you lose a family member, something always emerges out of it. My father was a farmer and a man of the soil. When I used to travel on commissions, I would take my photographs, but I would always take pictures of trees whenever I went for him. He was living in Johannesburg and I was living in Cape Town, and I would share the photographs with him. In 2005, he got really ill. In the last few weeks of his life, I became very restless. I started taking photographs of trees, printing them, and making collages out of them, but I felt so helpless because I knew that he wouldn’t be able to enjoy them for much longer, even if I framed them. I printed them on fabric and made a quilt out of them. I flew out to Joburg and put the quilt over him. At the time, I didn’t realise what I was doing. Much later, when I started thinking about the materiality of my work, I thought back to that time, when I was compelled to print something onto fabric and then make it into an object that was protective, something that my father could feel. It was a gesture for me to be able to connect with him in a way that wasn’t standard. It was the closest I could get to him.

When my mother died in 2011, she left behind about two hundred albums of family photographs and a chest of drawers filled with pictures. When she was dying, she asked a journalist, who was a friend of ours, to help her write her memoirs because she got so weak she couldn’t write anymore. She really wanted to write her memoirs for her children and grandchildren. She left out a lot of very important information (laughs) and said to me: 'I have a brilliant idea. Why don’t you go through my family archives and illustrate my memoirs?'. She had every picture digitally scanned. When I was looking through her photos, I realised how she was incredibly protective of the way she presented the photographs, how family albums and vernacular photographs told the story she had chosen to tell. Everybody was smiling. No one was crying. It looked like we were this very happy, wonderful family. There was nothing dark, nothing problematic, nothing painful. When I was in New York, I started thinking about these family photographs a lot, about their duality. Both on a personal level around trauma and also in the South African spectrum of the politics of apartheid, the photographs showed us sitting as this happy family. There were so many things as a child that I didn’t know, and that I didn’t know how to articulate and was scared of talking about, and things about the realities of South Africa that I only found out when I was a teenager. This political conversation that one has with different generations about where people come from made me think about the role of vernacular photography, but also the photographs that haven’t been taken.

PH: The work 'Cuttings' stems from my own personal archive, looking at my history, and bringing parts of my history together, using archival photographs, title deeds that my ancestors were given by the colonial government when they first arrived in South Africa, old recipes, and actual objects such as laces and tea towels, and combining them into one piece. I initially had it as something to look at, but similarly to the quilt, I turned it into something else—this time, a dress. I felt that one needs to wear their history. I came back to South Africa and started working with women from the Keiskamma Art Project on the history of the land, the Eastern Cape, and the contextual stories of this contentious piece of land that the Xhosas and the British were fighting over. Historically, it had been with the Xhosas, who collected rocks to make clay as a cosmetic and ritualistic commodity. The British colonial government stopped the Xhosas from collecting the rocks. Part of the process of creating the 'Cuttings' work involved revisiting this site of land, a very conflictual and violent place where my ancestors were given their land. The colonial government forbade any trade between the British and the Xhosas, and the British and the Afrikaners. My great-great-grandfather was killed in a botched cattle trade deal. The British government also prohibited any trade between the settlers and the Xhosa, making it very dangerous to trade illegally. When I first went to this place, it was very moving. Every time I reflect on where I want to go now with this work, I keep coming back to this place, the Eastern Cape. Going back to what you were saying, Nii, about the landscape telling a story and memory being attached to the land itself, to a physical place, I also feel that there is an ecological element to it.

NO: There is something about our survival. For me, the first acknowledgment is toward the land; our flesh and blood are of the land, wherever we are. The sooner we are able to build our relationship to it and appreciate what land is, I mean, a lot of people speak about the environmental damage of plastic, but I rarely hear people talk about their relationship with the land. Because you are not finding meaning with the land itself, you are very easily going to start making the same mistakes with something else. I always like to think about the land as my first step in developing any sort of ecological intelligence that I want to attain. A lot of my influences now are based on working with artists or activists who, through their work, are engaging with the land. Branching off into the future, we see that some of us want to leave the planet and go to other places, but we haven’t even explored the realms that we are not familiar with here on this planet. Few of us have made journeys into the non-physical realm or understand the relationship between us and the non-physical, the energetic gravity that pulls us down to this land. We need to be able to find a connection between the bottom of our feet and the energetic roots that attract us to this Earth. This is what I see with Pippa’s work 'Cuttings'. These tapestries take me to some of those places that have been invisible to us for so long. She situates our mothers and sisters in a very rooted way. The land actually cocoons them. The land roots itself around them. There’s dignity and strength defining these personalities, these women. I am made to travel into another place, a non-physical space. That, for me, is very powerful and is what art, I believe, should be doing: allowing us to connect to those places of spirit and the intangibles.

PH: Thanks for saying this, Nii. In South Africa, land is such a political and contentious conversation. It has been for centuries and is deep in brutal and bloody wars. There is so much pain in the land, but there is also so much regrowth and regeneration. One thing that I wanted to do with 'Cuttings' was to detangle ourselves from our shared history, how history has been told in such segregated ways. Physically going on that field trip to the Eastern Cape was so powerful because you realize that it is not only history we cannot detangle ourselves from but also the actual land. When I think of Nii's work, especially 'Big Dreams: Life Built on Gold,' looking at gold and resources, I was thinking about the power of that work and the story it tells about the ecological wounds, the Earth, and these big ecological scars. The scars kind of mimic the wounds we inflict on ourselves and those we inflict on others on our bodies. It made me think of the metaphor of what is visible and what is not, and the role of photography within that. It made me think of this incredible history in Africa of natural resources and exploitation and the impact this has had not only on the spirit of people but on the spirit of the Earth. During this time of COVID-19, everyone is looking at their immediate environment and some forms of survival. What I am hoping is that a lot of people will become aware of how we can't abandon the Earth as humans. Without the Earth, we cannot exist, and we cannot survive. We cannot abandon nature. The timing of this conversation is so unbelievable for me because I have been thinking about clay as a material in my work and what to do next with it. I want to do something about climate change, but I haven't been able to figure out why I am connecting climate change, history, and clay. It is a timeline, but it also connects to politics and pain. I really responded to the series about gold as being like a spirit.

NO: Absolutely, look at what gold does to us. We are willing to kill for it. We are misinterpreting its communication. It fuels capitalism and wars. On the good side, it has helped with our technology, but on the other side, we haven't learned how to understand it or its nature completely. We see minerals and extraction, rocks, and trees as objects that can be used. We have little connection with them as conscious beings. Just because a nugget of gold doesn't move doesn't mean it is not emitting any form of consciousness or vibrations. But it is obviously vibrating to us, even though we are hugely destructive in acquiring it. There is a lot that we need to learn and many questions to ask. It is important to see beyond the image, beyond the photograph, for our work to be able to take us there. There is so much for us to learn to connect with this thing that we call land. I think that 99 per cent of human beings are ignorant of the spirit of this land. We see it in very opportunistic ways. Connecting with the landscape for me is a very spiritual experience, especially when I am photographing because I have to be observant and intuitive. I have to wait to be called. It is not a question of me just going; I have to wait. It is important to make yourself available for the story to call you. This, for me, happens especially with works about the land and the landscape. I got very excited looking at Pippa's work because there is everything about us in there.

JB: When I was looking at both of your work, what really struck me was this notion of fragmentation, of fragments. In Pippa's work, the stitching between different pieces, and for you, Nii—I was reading something about your work and aphantasia—the impossibility of forming images in your mind. I would be interested to hear more about Pippa's use of fractures and Nii's creation of blurry images.

PH: I like to think about landscape as an extension of our bodies when we speak about fragments. Stitching, for me, is metaphorically related to a lot of different things: repairing, mending, showing scars, and not trying to make things pretty to the eye, but truthful. The needle can be seen as violent. It can also separate. The body and the landscape are one, but we separate ourselves from the land so much, and we become fragmented because of that, dispersed. The loss of natural memory of what the land means to us is also something that removes us from the landscape more and more. Fragmentation around the 'Cuttings' work is very much about bringing separate pieces together. Sometimes the fabrics look so good together; sometimes they look dreadful. The conversation we need to have about the land is not necessarily comfortable.

NO: You mentioned aphantasia, right? I think there is a connection with the fragment, with the stitching together of visions. When I discovered that I couldn't see in my mind's eye, it came as a shock. A lot of meditation involves visualization. I had been doing meditation for years, assuming that I was seeing what was going on in my mind. In 2016, during a workshop in Ghana, we were asked to visualize somebody and then describe them, so the other participants would draw the person we had in mind. I was sketching away what people were describing, but when I had to describe one of my sons, I could not do it. For the rest of the week, I put a picture of my son on my phone, thinking that if I looked at this picture long enough, it would stay in my mind. Of course, it didn't. I was confused but realized later on that I wasn't alone. I heard about a photographer who used photographic images as a way to keep and store his memories. I cannot see any images in my head, except for flashes in my mind’s eye. I realized that my photography was influenced by this state of being. I look for feelings instead of classic, beautiful, and 'straight' images.

PH: When I looked at your work, Nii, especially ‘Who Knows Tomorrow,’ one of the first things that I was moved by was its spiritual dimension. There is an incredible gravity and strength to your images, but you cannot pin them down somehow; they feel like they move in front of you. You don't immediately go to the places shown. The images take you beyond the places straight away. It feels like your images are about humanity, about the experience of being human, but also at the same time, being in connection with the spiritual world. Your pictures are very symbolic in that sense.

NO: You were talking about clay; this is it, this is where we find our common ground, in very abstract ways. Your clay images are also evoking this otherworldly place, this spiritual ancientness. In your work, it's not just tapestry, nor just stitching, but there is so much commonality in the way you see and the way I see. But we have different ways of producing, of making it come alive.

 The transcription of this interview was made possible thanks to Le projet IMPACT by Xavier Gradoux & Jérôme Jacquin.