By Stephanie Amata.
Tell us a bit about yourself.
I am writer and photographer studying History and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. My studies and my art are both motivated by my interest in outsiders and what it means to be an “other” in any context and also how we reconstruct the world based on our beliefs and how we see things and people. Essentially how our physical environment can tell us stuff about ourselves and our history. That’s something I’m really interested in both in my photography and in my studies. So most of my work is around that.
Between writing and photography, which one came first for you?
I don't think anyone started first, every time I try to think about where either of them started, I get to a dead end because it goes too far back beyond what I can remember. I remember being 5 and asking my mum for a camera and I’ve been writing forever. The roots have gone too far in my memory that I can’t identify them I just know I’ve been with them for as long as I can remember. But I guess, actually, writing has been favoured more because I’ve had the instruments. With photography, in order to have practised more, I needed a camera and I’ve not always had a camera, not even a phone camera so in that way writing has had the upper hand. But I can’t say I love writing more than I love photography.
Tell us about how your latest body of work, Seeing Enugu, exhibited at PhotoScratch came about.
My family moved to Enugu when I was 11 when I moved to boarding school. So you can imagine that I spent most of my time in boarding school and my holidays in Enugu so I didn’t get the opportunity to enter into the Enugu community. It’s been 10 or 11 years since I’ve lived in Enugu and I still don’t feel like I belong there or I know my way around there. So that mystifies Enugu for me cause I’m always trying to in a way claim it for myself too no matter how big or small the claim may be. Whenever such a mystery presents itself, it’s only natural that I try to explore it through writing and photography so I’ve written about Enugu previously. I have tried to take pictures of Enugu but like I said, I’m away for school and then back only for 3 weeks of the holiday. So the first time I really tried to embark on a project where I tried to see Enugu for myself, to explore Enugu or my lack of ‘Enugu-ness’ with photography was two or three years ago and I think the summer after that I was going to go back home with my camera but I lost my camera a week before I went back home. Then last summer was the first time I really had the opportunity and the presence of mind and the time because I was there for a month and I really went in. When I went in, obviously for a lot of projects, I’m not exactly sure what it is that is going to come out of it. But I knew I wanted a picture for myself, I wanted to see Enugu for myself. Exhibiting at photo scratch, it’s a work in progress type of exhibition, it really helped me greatly to see more about what my work is and I think now I can say very confidently that the project was a portrait of Enugu from my perspective, so it’s not the true story of Enugu, It’s not even a story. It’s me trying to capture the impression that Enugu leaves on me.
So you went in with no preconceived idea?
I mean there was an idea which was to see because I never see Enugu in the media I consume. So it was almost like I was just going to do whatever, I had the colours that I really wanted to capture, things that I wanted to tell myself that ‘It’s true’ that this is what I see. For example, the redness of Enugu, I remember once I was talking to one of my teachers in my IB [International Baccalaureate] school here in the UK, I think it was a geography lesson and I was saying that we have red soil back in Enugu and he said no that’s not true, that there’s no red soil in the whole wide world. So little things like that that I wanted to confirm for myself that ‘it is true’. Another one of those things was how much of an old city Enugu was. I really wanted to see Enugu for myself. I don’t know who I was trying to prove it to, maybe myself but I just wanted to prove that the way I felt about Enugu existed and I wanted something that when I went to my mind and when I try to imagine Enugu, I could readily call on these images as memory. That’s not the most precise thing but it was still a motive.
They were particular themes that came through like religion and the influence of Fulani people in Enugu.
That was very interesting but I didn’t bring it up earlier because it wasn’t anything new to me. I’ve been there for 12 years so I’ve seen the gradual changing of Enugu. Those two things were things that I was seeing better not newly. So with the Christianity, Enugu is such a Christian place, Igbo people are very Christian. I’m not saying it’s a bad or good thing at all but this is just who they are and it’s very integral to their identity and to what they make of the world around them. So it’s one of those things where I was looking at our built environment to tell me about how Christian Enugu is, and it really did, all the signboards, the houses. There was that picture of a fence that had the Holy Family painted on it and such a thing is not uncommon or like you’d see people’s gates in Enugu that had like religious inscriptions or “God protect this house”. It’s a nice way to see how people craft their worlds according to their beliefs and own for themselves. The Fulani-Enugu theme, when I moved in 2008, it wasn’t like that at all and it has been really interesting to see the development and the progression and the increasing Fulani-Muslim presence in Enugu due to their nomadic nature and I sense that a lot of it obviously has to do with what’s going on in the North and some people finding refuge in the East. It has not been rosy, it hasn’t been completely easy and nice for these communities because there have been clashes. A number of them, like clashes between Fulani communities and indigenous communities, were killings. Some of them were far away from me but some were actually really close. I would know people who died, someone who went to my church and it was so interesting to see how Islamophobic Igbo people are like a lot of the people I know and talk to and just to see how, change, in this particular context has been complicated. I try to highlight those, I could do it better I feel but for now that’s what it is.
It’s an argument almost as old as time. It’s a discussion that comes up all the time, a western or outsider or privileged people coming into a rural area and imposing their own view and selling that as the story of the place. I know it can happen outside racial lines so you could have Lagos people who live in Banana Island going to Makoko to do what white people would do. I’m aware of that and I’ve thought about it in the context of my own work and one of the things I got from family members was that perhaps I should have soon the more affluent side of Enugu, which haunted me for a while because I see how very valid a feeling, a sentiment it is in my work but, when I was making the work, I wasn’t thinking of proving any economic status or cultural superiority or lack of inferiority to anybody. I was doing it to see what it was I seeing and seeing what it was I was seeing from my own perspective as an inside-outsider of Enugu. My experience of Enugu is not affluent, okay that’s a lie it’s not completely affluent, my dad has money, we live in an expensive estate but I don't have friends at this place because I hardly spend time in Enugu. This summer, every time I went out of my house, I walked around my estate a lot of times, and I never saw people who actually owned the houses, I just always saw gatemen and some of the mallam’s children from the shack. Those were the people I made friends with eventually, those are the people I ended up interacting with. Every time my friend, Frank took me around Enugu, it never occurred to me that Enugu was impoverished or affluent. It existed to me in this vast middle ground between affluent and impoverished to the point that even thinking of Enugu is terms of a poor place or even a rural place did not really occur to me. I wouldn’t call Enugu rural, it calls itself a city even though I don’t think its a city I think it’s town but I won't say it’s rural. Enugu is not affluent is what I’m trying to say.
There's a huge sense of stasis that comes through in the work as if everything has been paused.
I feel much more of that than what the actual Enugu is which is where I’d like to hammer in on the subjectivity of the project because as much as Enugu is fairly static, compared to any other place it's not the most bubbling place. I’ve lived in Aba as well it’s not a bubbling place at all but myself, even more, I am more an outsider. I don’t know if you remember the picture where there was the guy outside watching a football match and there was the red cross on the fence, I look to that picture as a self-portrait of me in Enugu. This is again another thing the feedback from photo scratch helped me recognise, I wasn’t trying to tell a story about Enugu, I was trying to, you could say, write a poem about my experience of Enugu so it wasn’t a documentary because that would be a bit dishonest because the research didn’t go that much into actual Enugu things. So calling it more of a subject poem and owning the subjectivity of that really releases me from the pressure to tell a true story, to be liable to all these different people and all the different ways you can see Enugu. I think that’s valid enough because you don’t have anything else from Enugu. It's not like I see anything else to start with. When you read a poem you don’t ask the poem to tell you the story or history or narrative of a place you ask it to put you in a place, you ask it to transport you to a mood and to get a sense. That is the closest to what my work is or trying to do.
You can visit Immaculata's website here or follow her on Instagram, here. Thank you for reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment