Interview with Sana Ginwalla
by Valentina Orrù
Sana Ginwalla is a Zambia-born artist and curator based in Lusaka and with origins in India and Myanmar. Spanning from photography, writing to archiving and curating, her practice often looks at themes and politics of identity, home and belonging through a range of mediums such as language and images.
Her ongoing projects include Everyday Lusaka, an online platform for artists to showcase their photographs of Lusaka to positively counter stereotypes of Africa; and Zambia Belonging, a counter-archive of found and submitted photographs made in Zambia that would not usually be recognised in the state archives.
Everyday Lusaka recent first solo exhibition, Outside In, inaugurated the opening of the TotalEnergies Art Gallery at the Alliance Française de Lusaka. Sana is the curator of their upcoming James Barnor’s exhibition A Photograph For Every Story which opens on the 16th of November. The launch exhibition of Zambia Belonging is on the 25th of November at the Lusaka National Museum.
09/11/2021
When I think of these disciplines in relation to each other; for me it’s a way of finding alternative ways to communicate – not necessarily information – but also a feeling and an experience. As I prepare for two upcoming shows that I will be curating, I’ve also been thinking about how that can be done practically. I have been looking at exhibition design and inventing display solutions for in spaces that aren’t necessarily purpose-built. This has mostly come from a desire to see and create shows in Lusaka that challenge the conventional methods of exhibition making. So, I see these disciplines as working towards filling the gaps in communication that are happening in my environment, and also trying to push possibilities of what can be done using different types of media in conjunction with one another.
Online you see a lot of imagery from Zambia that is centred on poverty, wildlife and works from the late 90s when a lot of photojournalists were coming to Zambia to photograph the AIDS epidemic. There are also a lot of really beautiful black and white animals and wildlife photographs around, which sell really well as there is a hunger for that. And a lot of photographers in Lusaka have leaned towards commercial work like wedding photography because it does pay. Thus, with exhibition we wanted to do, our intention from the start was to try to fill in the gaps of what we don't see – simple everyday images of the city. We didn’t want the exhibition to be too specific either – we wanted to look at the modernity, banality and the beauty of the everyday in Lusaka. And so, taking inspiration from pages like Everyday Africa, Everyday Lusaka was birthed.
Currently I’m running Everyday Lusaka myself. My intention for it is to move towards becoming a platform for other artists to document the city. Since the start I‘ve been aware of my positionality as a non-black person making photographs in an African city. My level of access, understanding, and experience of the everyday is very different from the next person. So we have always tried to share images by people from any background, whether the photograph is taken by Zambians by nationality or not – we understand that everybody has their own visual experience and documentation of the city. My work is to make that available to more people nationally and internationally – whether through Instagram, postcards, exhibitions or writing.
Sana Ginwalla, Street Style.
By the following month, we realised that we didn’t want to be the typical millennials who are just living their life online. Life exists outside the internet and not everybody has Instagram or has even regular internet access. So how could we reach different people and understand how they were actually feeling about this? I said, let's just print postcards! I didn't care that they weren't really a thing anymore but what I had in mind was to make postcards that countered the historical ones that perpetuated that singular, “noble savage” and even Orientalist.
We curated a selection of images and sold the postcards at Dutch Reform Market in April 2018 a month after the Instagram page was launched. We let people know online that we were doing this, and what was really amazing was that we broke even and made profit on the same day. For me it wasn't about the money, but rather it gave us a strong indication that there was an interest in this type of work. This fuelled us to photograph Lusaka a lot more and it ended up becoming a source of income towards an exhibition that we still wanted to do. Finally in the same year we had our first group show at 37d Gallery, which was just opening their new space.
At the moment I’m in a position where I can work with other artists and look after the whole process of printing and selling their photographs. Artists get commissions from the sales and can see how it’s possible to make money out of their art while they’re still contributing to the larger ethos of Everyday Lusaka about countering misunderstandings and misconceptions of Africa.
Kalenga Nkonge, Free Read.
I became obsessed with them and after a few months of bugging the studio manager, I visited the attic and found many more uncollected negatives with unidentified years, sitters or photographers. I ended up collecting the whole bulk, knowing that the studio intending on disposing of the images in their process of downsizing and changing ownership.
At the time, I was applying for an Honours degree in Curatorship at the University of Cape Town and I used this collection of images for my research proposal. That’s how it became an academic project as part of my final degree show. UCT offered support in the scanning and digitisation of the photos, and I set up a website for the thesis which was called The Studio Stool. The stool commanded a mode of being once people entered the studio, and I was interested in exploring that further.
Since the beginning I have been very preoccupied with the issue of ownership and my intentions with the project. These are all images of people that are probably deceased, I don't know who took these photographs and who actually own them. So my idea with this first bulk was that the photos could eventually be repatriated, people could find themselves, their parents or their belongings in them and claim them back.
Then fast forward to last year I was in the process of finding more contributors doing a lot of manic photographic research around Lusaka. I also launched The Studio Stool on Instagram to see how people would respond to it but that didn't do too well because there was no story or context behind the photos. At the start of 2021 I met the co-founder of Vintage Addis Ababa which does similar things to us. We talked about how we could work together and it was great to engage with someone who could help me figure out how I could go about this project. Later in the year this June, we applied together for the ANT Adaptation Fund from ProHelvetia and got it. We have since been working on rebranding the project, collecting more photographs and preparing for a launch exhibition. We have also hired interns to help us with collecting, scanning and writing about images sourced from photo-contributors.
The contributors at the moment are people that we know or have approached us and are willing to share their images online and potentially be part of an exhibition. The concept behind Zambia Belonging is to do with identity politics and how images help us understand ourselves. The idea is to look at different ways that we can weave stories from each contributor with their images and how that can be linked to the person's sense of self. For now we're looking at photographs but in the future we would like to explore objects, writings and sounds too.
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From Zambia Belonging archive, sitters & date unknown. Photo: Fine Art Studios.
It’s interesting that you have also been looking to move onto objects and sounds. What is your idea of archive and how does it serve the vision behind your projects?
When we came to rebrand The Studio Stool we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what we were going to rename it. I was very intentional to not use the word “photo” because I'm not only looking at photography and want to have that freedom to do other things. But then also not using the word “archive” at all because it implies something that is hidden and not really accessible. What I'm trying to do here is to come up with a whole different type of approach altogether that that doesn't look at making things privatised and putting them away just for future reference the way institutional archives usually do.
The idea with both Zambia Belonging and Everyday Lusaka instead is to look at an archive for future generations. These images are not dead, they might be of deceased people, but they are finding context today. We’re also looking at it from a global point of view as I don't think that in 30 years from now a single identity is going to be a thing anymore. People are moving around and are getting more and more complex in their identity politics.
Zambia Belonging aims to documenting the stories of everyday people with the same approach and value that we do for political leaders and government officials. I made a post recently where parts of a found negative image slowly moves into a positive – which intervenes in the image in non-destructive and conceptual way. That’s how I see my intervention as a as a curator and as an artist – exploring how we can work with a photograph using its process, story and journey as a means to make a different body of work altogether.
That's a great question because it links really well with Zambia Belonging and our approach to collecting images. We have been very intentional about including different ways which identity can be described. One of them is hair for example, which is very important for a lot of people of colour, or food which a lot of people still hang on to as way to maintain a connection to their heritage and sense of nationality; and also, fashion, what we wear, the language we speak, the music we listen to.
The way that I relate to my own heritage is bit more complex and though I was born and raised in Zambia, my parents are not from here. My mom would say her home is Myanmar and my dad’s is India. The way they relate to their home is by speaking their first language, eating the food and listening to the music. I happen to know way too many Indian songs from the 40s in the 50s! So the food I eat and the languages we speak at home is what has allowed me to stay in touch with my Indian and Burmese side.
Echoes started with my dad having Covid last year and my parents and I having to quarantine for six weeks at home together. My parents speak with each other in Urdu and I grew up responding to them in English. During quarantine, I became very observant of what was being said in the house. I really love some of these Urdu words as I associate some of them with my grandparents and sometimes there isn't the equivalent in English. At the same time I was also scanning some images from my own family archive which I have a deep connection with. So I wanted to marry that with the language and create something that is very personal but also beneficial to whoever wants to learn a word or two in a different language.
I didn't know how Echoes was going to be received as I thought maybe it’s too personal and decontextualized for other people to understand its importance to me. But I just did it, initially for a friend who was interested in learning Urdu, and then I made it a piece of writing for Amaliah. Echoes is part of an ongoing body of work that includes videos and photographs. It is part of a project called Yaaddasht, which means “memories”.
Both from the series Echoes.
What I see in Zambia is that there isn't a policy around art or an appropriate ministry for art to fall under which reflects on the lack of art education or support. Art is not something that a lot of people can just do full time. There are artists for example who are doing photography and videography, and then also have a farm or are raising children too.
Furthermore, I can only speak about the art industry to a certain extent because I’ve had the privilege to pursue art degrees. So in Zambia, people are really good at what they do but often haven’t had the opportunity to be formally trained, or if they have it isn’t always a profession that people can solely rely on for livelihood. And there isn't anything like a central hub to upskill artists or to just share knowledge about things. Procurement also is a big challenge here, where to get hold of materials can take up to one month or two which definitely affects the momentum and your workflow.
So the playing field is not quite levelled, but there are people who are still doing it and making space for themselves and that’s quite inspiring. Zambia and Nigeria are two of the countries in the world that have the highest number of entrepreneurs. And what I love about that is that people make things happen for themselves, like “okay I want to do something so I'm going to do it myself!”.
Sana Ginwalla, Politics & Healing.
Yeah, the reason why I haven’t pushed for Everyday Lusaka to go international just yet is because I really wanted it to be a project that was well-known and celebrated locally first, and for that hype to exist locally. I know that this interest is there as proven by the Outside In exhibition opening at the Alliance Française last month where almost 300 people visited the show.
The work of artists from Africa for example may well celebrated in Paris and in other European cities but I’m not sure how much reach is happening in their local hometown. A lot of times these works really do blow up in Europe because of European funders and curators which is all great. But for me, I have never wanted it to be a case where somebody sees work from Everyday Lusaka first in the US and they tell their friends in Zambia “oh my god, did you know about this?”, and they say “no”. I want there to be a sense of collective ownership and pride when Zambian’s see brands they know are gaining traction internationally.
More than the internet itself, it’s social media that has been an important facilitator. Instagram has done a lot for growing our organic following and with Zambia Belonging we actually had to rely on it to put the word out there without having to spend too much money. But this has also been a reminder of how internet connectivity and electricity are an issue for a lot of people here as they can be too expensive or not reliable. So we have to consider how to reach people physically.
Print is not dead in Zambia, which I really enjoy. That’s why I have been doing postcards and zines for example and have been very aware of that physical aspect of things. Lately I have been working on a sustainable exhibition structure for the Zambia Belonging pop-up launch which is coming up at the end of November. I want to be able to re-use it for more things in both outdoor and indoor spaces, either purpose-built or not, like the Lusaka National Museum or different malls around Lusaka.