Thursday 13 January 2011

IDENTITY ***(ONGOING)***

Either you have said it yourself, you have heard it from someone or you have wondered about it - the question is - how do children who are born or immigrate to a different country identify themselves. 

I was born in Chile, then moved to Ecuador at the age of five after living there for five years moved to Spain and consecutively five years later to London. I felt I had been part of these cultures and yet I didn't belong to either - often when people ask me where I am from, in my most sincere of reflections I reply - I don't know. I find it tricky to express myself via s single medium.

I've become a diverse character, sometimes described as "wild" or "free" I am not sure what to make of those adjectives. I don't like being labeled. I have chosen to adopt and discard traditions using my intuition and at my own accord. Not fully belonging, is a lonely road to take and for those who dare to take this road there can be exiting times ahead full of mystery and curiosities, but also an inability to relate or feel love or any real attachments that at time can make one feel lonely or vulnerable.

From an early age I became a inwards character, I reflected on my surroundings. This made me very critical of people; I saw how different types had different values and as a little girl I was grew curious that everyone thought their way was the right way, across different cultures and continents. As an adult, at 25 I am still very much confused. To form my identity, I have no common ways or subconscious behavioural patterns previously learnt, rather I have to look at myself every time and feel what choices to make following my own heart beat as guide. This can sometimes be exhausting.

I have never been one to follow norms or crowds, often I find myself simply pondering on the different ways there are to approach a subject. This makes me a hard character to understand. I have the fire of the Latin Blood in my veins, that is for certain.

To look how this issue of cross identity has affected me and others in more detail I will examine my personal life and also that of others, I want to find as well as similarities, contrasts.

I will be meeting with Photographer Dereke Wiafe, who is currently working photographic series "A Lost Child". His previous series include "Waking up Early" and "Borough Kids", over the past year he also lectured at Coventry University.



Dereks account on The Problem of Being

At any moment I take to think of myself as being ‚British‛ or ‚Ghanaian‛, my impressions are fleeting. The thoughts I conjure up are transient, steeped in contradiction and often blur the image of African tradition with Western modernity. For I can one day be the quietly-mannered Fante boy who has an ‘English’ dislike of Palm-nut soup, and the next, be in a hooded sweater listening to Hip Life as I browse the National Gallery. Neither is typical of what might be seen as a traditional son from either country, but they’re perhaps signs of a changing cultural portrait . Yet amidst this change, many second generation youth will ask them the question - ‘am I at home here? Do I belong in this picture of my country?’ For me it’s a question I seek answers to in the pictures I portray: narratives from my imaginary homeland.

Understanding- A Lost Child
I urge you to stay at home


Growing up in London, home was where the portrait of a child’s character and heritage were synonymous with the stories whispered about them; stories where fiction blended into history and fable into sermon. If by day a youngster lost the taste for their mother’s cooking or fashioned their hair after Bob Marley, by night, their newly adopted ways would become material for proverbs that frowning parents would tell on the ills of forsaking tradition. Proverbs for all to hear and in the ol’ Ghanaian custom sigh ‚Oh Obayerafo, Come Home‛. But to which picture of home and national identity was a child of two worlds supposed to fit into? Was it the British, the Ghanaian or neither?

The work here is my reimagining of such stories; a remaking of them into narratives on the romantic promise and uneasy harmonies of cultural hybridity. Tilted ‘Obayerafo’, after the euphemism ‘A Lost Child’ , the narratives appear through an interplay of text and image. In the visual work, a series of large scale photographs are presented where tradition and place become the Other to a group of young British born Ghanaians. Shot in their family homes, each scene recreates an everyday encounter where modernity coexists in an unsure relationship with tradition and subtle gestures seem to unsettle the experience of belonging. Here, as in the folklore of West African story tellers, symbolism takes reign. An atmosphere of muted colours and dimmed light veers attention towards objects that go unnoticed.


Hair, dress and minute details in books and furnishings all become clues that build a picture of place and identity but unfold little. The sitters too play their role. Faces retreat from our gaze into obscurity and bodies are molded after the stillness of African wood figurines. Their poise hints at a condition of being, but direction is uncertain and purpose unclear. In ways, the photograph takes the mantle of narrator, performing these spaces into proverbial tales. They invite the viewer to make sense of tensions between belonging and displacement, tradition and change, abrogation and appropriation and where they become visible in the images.


Written from the viewpoint of a fictional narrator know only as ‚Mr Wiafe‛, text accompanies the photographs playfully informing the work with reference to the difficultly of translating cultural identity and adding humorous insight into the complex relationship the artist has with his Ghanaian and British heritage.

1 comment:

  1. As the population grows, countries develop and cultures merge, it doesn't matter where you are from anymore. We all share this planet, and we all share the experience of being human.

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