Reimagining Home: Seeking Freedom in Collage

In the folktale, “The Ghost’s House in the Sky,” Anansi ascended into the sky and forgot his way back home. When Anansi witnessed Duppy travel up to his house in the clouds with the help of a song, he snuck in by repeating the tune while Duppy was away. After accomplishing his goal of eating Duppy’s food, Anansi realized he couldn’t remember the song to get back down. He didn’t descend until Duppy himself returned, sang the song, and proceeded to eat Anansi. 

For the past few days, I’ve been sitting with this tale and what it may be trying to tell us about one’s ability and willingness to call upon memory.

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s 2023 solo exhibition A Making of Ghosts interrogates the fallibility of memory through the artistic modification of images. Hwami has spoken about finding freedom in a collage process which threatens the conception of a fixed image. The rejection of finality that collage making allows can be seen in Hwami’s artistic process through layering, splicing, duplicating, and rearranging. This process provides an artist with the opportunity to deeply interrogate images in order to make precise decisions about which narrative is portrayed. An artist speaks to fragments of stories saying, yes I want you to be here. Or, no, you cannot be known.

Our memories experience much of the same. There are images within each of us which have been modified to a degree we’ll likely never fully be aware. The brain has the ability to protect us from memories too painful as well as the ability to spare us from details deemed unworthy of remembrance. Some memories are so beloved to us that we try to place them wherever we can. In journals, camera rolls, the ears of anyone who’ll listen. At times we misremember, we confuse certain memories with others. Like hands trying to find their way through darkness. Reaching for anything that feels right. There are memories which leave no doubt and are buried nonetheless.

In her 2017 autobiographical solo exhibit If You Keep Going South You’ll Meet Yourself, Hwami turns to family photographs. In this exploration she configures notions of nostalgia, displacement, and self-inquiry as she reimagines the political landscape of her hometown of Gutu, Zimbabwe and creates images of a hopeful future. 

“The beauty of being a child of the diaspora is that we are able to reinvent ourselves and what it means to be African – if there is a shared meaning. Redefining what it means to be a Zimbabwean immigrant living in the UK, who has inhabited three different countries and multiple cultures.” - Kudzanai-Violet Hwami

I see the negative space in this collection as a representation for the fragmentation of memory. When looking back upon childhood one may think of brief moments, flashes, remnants of a larger story. More rarely do we retain fully intact sequences over a significant period of time. This fragmentation can be found in Mothers cloth and Mbizo station. In both pieces a figure sits faced forward before a white background in which objects float around them, offering an invitation to the onlooker to understand how the puzzle fits together. 

In Mothers cloth a woman is surrounded by her own flipped and inverted image. I imagine an artist who is weighing different versions or recollections of a loved one, contemplating on which story to tell. Mbizo station draws upon the obscurity of boundaries in memory. A man sits on a truck in front of a seemingly incomplete background. Did the artist choose to not finish painting the background? Did she finish it and then paint over it? Such a choice evokes the struggle to fully imaginally resurrect the past. 

When I think of places from my childhood I’m able to remember signature features, a porch or a comforting armchair. However, its totality escapes me. There exists blank space that I try to fit images into. Hwami’s work demonstrates that within the blank space is a freedom that invites boundless imaginary exploration. So when looking upon childhood, the blank space could be whatever I make it. Could become whatever I need it to become.

30 years earlier, multimedia artist Clarissa Sligh’s 1988 Reframing the Past offered a re-evaluation of the family photo album. In this form of familial record keeping, memories exist like statues, unmoving snapshots meticulously designed to portray an idyllic life, one obscured from those memories a person, or family, would like to forget. 

Sligh, who was raised in a Black Virginian neighborhood in the 50’s, realized her family photo album was created within the restrictive parameters of the archetypal white American family. Thus, in Reframing the Past, Sligh’s reconstruction of her family photos frees the images from such constraints as she draws upon her own memory in order to convey the reality behind her family’s lived experience. Where Hwami’s experimentation with backgrounds suggests the fragmentation of memory, Sligh’s obscuring of backgrounds intimates deep rumination. 

I imagine an artist looking upon a childhood photo and profoundly reflecting on the true lived experience uncaptured by the camera lens. By cutting a subject out of an image and placing them in front of a solid color or writing over a background that she does leave intact, Sligh asks onlookers to disregard what appears to be for what she is directly telling us. 

When looking at a photo that obfuscates reality it could become easy to eventually succumb to that narrative, or be fooled by the story it's trying to convince you of. In this way, the act of remembering is a truth telling. Sligh’s collage work is a defense of truth. 

In an interview with NEA Arts Sligh said, “When we look around us, the past appears to be invisible but it is always present.” She expresses that art making for her is an opportunity to give voice to invisible narratives. Hwami and Sligh both offer perspectives of looking upon the past, specifically at childhood photos. In their resurrections of the distant time before, we see the fragile, fragmentary, and malleable nature of memory. Both artists have found in the collage making process, a freedom to redefine or reaffirm memory.

The artist looks to the photos and says, come, let’s see what I can make of you.