By Kerstin Hacker
With deep sadness am I posting this
paper I wrote about my collaboration with Gerald Mwale, Lecturer at University
of Zambia, who sadly passed away on the 23. February. His enthusiasm and extraordinary vision for photographic
education, research and collaboration was unprecedented in Zambia and I will
miss his wise council as a colleague and a friend. We had many plans
together. Rest in peace, my friend.
Over the last twelve years, my colleagues Gerald Mwale and I had been working together to build the foundations for sustainable institutional and artistic collaborations in Zambia and to explore how collaborative artistic networks from the global North and South can challenge the still existing visual narratives and promote visual self-governance through photography. This post charts these collaborative approaches and discusses the broader issues of North/South academic collaborations and why they are often difficult to sustain.
My interest in Zambian photography and photography education started in 2004, when I was working in Zambia as a freelance photographer for an UK NGO. I had worked as a freelance photographer for over a decade and was always keen to work abroad. Many photographers work for NGOs at a reduced rate to enhance their international portfolio. I was one of them. While in Zambia, I started to ask questions on why local photographers were not hired by NGOs and the responses all pointed at lack of visual education opportunities for photographers. With the help of Zambian friends I got in touch with Gerald Mwale, journalism lecturer at the University of Zambia.
Bwire M Musalika highlighted the lack
of training facilities for African photojournalists in 1994: “They are mostly
not formally trained in the profession and are academically far less educated
in comparison with other journalists”. Quarter of a century later the photographic industry
is still without any academic foundations and photographers mostly learn
through informal and formal mentoring arrangements and focus on the commercial jobs.
“Unfortunately our biggest problem we have in Zambia is we don’t really
document our visual history and our pioneers in photography.” says photographer
Edwin Chibanga. In my interview with him he expresses his worry that there is
no incentive to uncover the history of photography in Zambia because of commercial
pressures on photographers and he hopes that “formal education in photography
might [change] our thinking”.
After initial seed funding from the British Council, Gerald Mwale and I received an Educational Partnerships in Africa Grant in 2009. In the next eighteen months we wrote the curriculum for the BA Photography at UNZA. We developed a curriculum with critical teaching and country-specific contents based on Zambia’s needs identified through academic exchanges, industry roundtables and writing intensives with British and Zambian colleagues. During the curriculum writing process we had to navigate biases and we had to actively develop our intercultural communication skills and raised our awareness of what it means to decolonialize our collaboration. Stoneman (2013) describes in Global Interchange: The Same but Different the dangers of not being aware inherent biases: “Clearly, the terms of academic activity and judgment deployed in global exchanges are not neutral or objective, but specific and determined. Without conscious or conspiratorial intent, they can reinforce the channels of one-way transmission and influence and efface the way in which Otherness is manufactured, experienced, and understood in the world” . While we were excited to learn from each other to build the curriculum content, we were more naïve about our institutional challenges.
In 2017, while waiting for the BA
Photography to make its way through the bureaucratic maze, artist Geoffrey
Phiri and I organised a photography workshop in collaboration with the Visual
Arts Council during my Generation Z exhibition at the Henry Tayeli Gallery in
Lusaka. We brought together a group of seven early career artists and
photographers for a nine-day workshop discussing Zambian emerging photographic
and broader lens based culture. The workshop created a creative social space or
Handlungsraum (Moentmann, 2002) in which participants were encouraged to explore
a wide range of visual narratives. The decoloniazation of workshop environment
was at the forefront of our intentions for this collaboration. Stoneman observed
during a North South film making workshop in Marakesh in 1990 that “The expositions from the south
relativize an insular and self-perpetuating image system from the north; such
discourses may begin as productions of individual self-expression by the
filmmaker and can go on to realize a broader social effect as they spread
through their audiences.“ Therefore, the workshop was designed to discuss and counteract
these self-perpetuating images and activate diverse visual narratives and
create an atmosphere in which it was possible to foster empathetic, democratic
and reflective peer to peer feedback processes. In Towards an ethnographic turn
in contemporary art scholarship, Fiona Siegenthaler (2013) describes this
collaborative interaction between artists as “encountering the ‘Other’ as an
individual, a colleague, a brother-in-arms, and a person with whom to share
ideas, artistic and personal interests, and a social as well as an art-related
practice’ (p744). The individual narratives the Zambian photographers chose to
explore were encouraging creative self-development and included fashion,
documentary and fine art practices. We were dealing with complex themes like
cultural heritage, ancestry, conservation and social injustices. The resulting
photographs were deliberate localised counter-narratives to the prevailing
western stereotypes. The resulting photographs were presented alongside my Generation
Z exhibition at the Henry Tayali Gallery at the end of the workshop.
A number of art collaborations have
recognised the importance of these learning spaces and organisations like the
Nigerian art and photography movement Invisible Borders “recognise the inevitable
importance of collaboration in the building of a solid life-long artistic
foundation” (2019). Invisible Borders sees itself “at the frontline of an idea
that will ensure greater productivity in the contemporary African arts scene”. One
of their projects invites photographers, artists and writers on collaborative
trans-African road trips documenting everyday life as it presents itself to
them as they are passing through. Results of these collaborations were shown at
the 2015 Venice Biennale curated by Okwui Enwezor. Enwezor was interested in
the interaction between art, art institutions and modernity on the African
continent. Speaking at the event Who do you think you are? Culture, identity
and the contemporary art museum (2017), Enwezor highlights the responsibility
galleries and universities need to take for decolonizing art production in
their countries.
In 2019 we therefore returned to
Zambia for a second workshop with the Visual Arts Council. The photographic
workshop focused on the Kalingalinga township of Lusaka. Narrowing the theme
and activity of the workshop came out of discussions with Gerald Mwale and artist Geoffrey Phiri, who had identified the area for its rapid gentrification
and societal change. We felt that focusing multiple and diverse visual
responses on a specific area would allow us to highlight the diversity of
access points and interpretations, which in itself would allow for diverse
storytelling and deconstruct the idea of a singular African visual narrative. Ghanaian
academic Prosper Tsikata observed, that: “These [African] countries are framing
and representing their own stories and experiences, challenging the
‘one-size-fits-all’ assumptions by participating in the creation of media
themes by themselves, about themselves and for themselves, with the possibility
of influencing how others frame and represent them. This is a clear departure
from the past.” (Tsikata, p40)
The township of Kalingalinga exemplifies
the rapid modernisation of Lusaka and the economic, social and societal changes
that come with that. We invited photographers and visual artists to respond
collaboratively to Kalingalinga in a wide range of styles including
documentary, still life, fashion and conceptual and fine art practices. The
photographers felt enriched and empowered to speak not only about their
photographic process and practice but also about social condition they encountered
while engaging with Kalingalinga’s microcosm. It highlighted that the arts can
be catalyst for a broader debate and “should be tapped for the diverse cultural
transformations they can make” (Kabanda, 2018)
Geoffrey Phiri, who
co-organised the workshop at the Zambian National Visual Arts Council summed it
up like this: The potential or rather the ability to tell our own stories is
very much the essence of the "Stories of Kalingalinga" workshop.
These images tell our tale. […] There is definitely no doubt that we are headed
in the right direction, we are building a network that will be active long
after the workshop. […] My hope is that other institutions will come on board
and thus the visual stories of Kalingalinga and Zambia will continue to
develop.”
Results from the collaboration were
exhibited in January 2020 in the Ruskin Gallery in Cambridge, are now hanging
in the Centre of African Studies at Cambridge University and will go on a
touring exhibition through Zambia in 2022.
In 2020 the University of Zambia re-structured the Mass Communication Department into a larger School of Mass Communication and the BA Photography curriculum, that Gerald and I had written together, was one of the first ones that was approved by the University senate. Gerald had worked tirelessly behind the scenes to make this happen. He will be greatly missed as an advocate for photography, journalism and the arts in Zambia.
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