COVID19 got in the way of quite our ambitious plan to show the Stories of Kalingalinga exhibition in the three venues in Zambia this year after it had been shown in the UK at the beginning of the year. Public gatherings are banned and travel restrictions will be in place for a long time. We, therefore, postponed the second leg of the exhibition tour until 2021.
But COVID 19 also gave us a unique opportunity to visually investigate photographic representations of Zambia during a pandemic. What are young photographers in Zambia concerned about during a pandemic, what is it like being at home, being worried, being isolated in a Zambian context? What visual material is missing? Will the newly produced images look different from the images we are familiar with African pandemics? Will the images add knowledge and allow us to understand the individual experiences better? Will they allow us to move away from the ‘disaster’ photographs that have so far been prevalent when depicting pandemics on the African continent?
Anglia Ruskin University(ARU) and the Zambian National Visual Arts Council (VAC) are therefore currently hosting an online coronavirus photography response project with eleven photographers from Zambia. The project aims to encourage personal responses of the photographers, who are invited to reflect on the time of social isolation, focus on their personal experiences and realities and respond creatively to the pandemic in a multitude of voices. Zambia and many other African countries are in the unique position of seeing the pandemic sweeping around the world, waiting if and when the pandemic will reach Zambia and wondering if the country will have prepared enough. The emotional tole of anticipation is part of the visual narrative of the project.
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| From the Instagram feed |
We encourage the photographers to find alternatives to the photographic approaches traditionally employed when commenting on a pandemic on the African continent and ask them to focus on personal and creative responses in a time of lockdown. This is allowing for a wide range of approaches to photography; photographers are using still life, portrait, documentary or fine art genres which interpret their experience. The project aims to emphasize the personal experience with the crises and counteract the ‘African pandemic photographs’, which often dehumanise the photographed.
My role in this project is that of an art animateur. I utilise my experiences in learning and teaching approaches to photography and will foster the participants’ self-learning. The aim is that the photographers find a higher degree of self-realization, self-expression, and awareness of belonging to the photography community during this time of crisis and support each other to become influencers both within Zambia and the wider world. The emphasis of the project is to develop local imagery that will change public perception and understanding of how this crisis is affecting Zambia. The aim of the project is to develop a local visual response and counteract the lack of local voices in the representation of everyday life in Africa.
Geoffrey Phiri, painter and former Chair of VAC is the local coordinator of the project. Geoffrey uses his extensive video training in this project. His acute observations and reflections on the constant change of urban life underpin the contextual framework of the programme.
We are making these locally produced images available on an Instagram account throughout the project. A weekly zoom meeting and a WhatsApp group are used as communication tools amongst the UK and Zambian photographers. The overall aim is to further strengthen the photography community in Zambia and promote the emerging visual voices from Zambia.
