It Takes a Village

To raise a child, to give its name, to cut the path, to raise the wall and to carve the stone.

Here I intend to lay bare the architecture of the village birthing Ghana Airways. I attempt to construct the scaffolding of belief, myths, thoughts, and ideas that congeal in this body of work. Ghana Airways operates in my imagination as a scenario that allows me the courage and legitimacy to ask questions I consider forbidden. It is a machine, conceptual yet real, that allows me to test what I know about who I am.

And it takes a village because who I am, also takes a village. We are communal, as sociologists proclaim. Our existence is tied to the spirit and sensibilities of the group, the village. So, as I ask myself, I must ask all the fingers, treating each as unique. Yet remembering that they clench together in resistance or extend openly.

My memory will be an important source of questions, anxieties, certain and uncertain truths, myths and moments. Some of these sources will be opaque and static, while others evolve as my understanding of how the village operates grows. Some of these sources are not exclusive to my mind and are shared through the collective understanding the village develops in response to our environment.

Yet in the same space that memory operates in a volatile and unstable state, (not unique or preserved in tangible recoverable material) we will find a space to situate and rearrange the important questions, anxieties, certain and uncertain truths, myths and moments. Imagination, another finger of the subconscious, will serve as a private space to dismantle the village.

I hope to map the steps and methods I followed and ignored, in taking the village down to the last straw. My intentions are not destructive, but rather playful and curious. I seek knowledge of what it “takes the village”, and what it takes to be part of the village.

Every village begins at home. So, we start at home.



In Absentia

I contemplate the various depictions of Ghana as my memory of the place begins to wane. I’m starting to forget what Ghana sounds like.

In the news, Ghana is a place I cannot recognize as power continues to swallow the vulnerable in broad daylight, with everyone too tired to react properly to the violence of everyday.

In my memory, it feels a place that is mine and mine alone. But I do not mean this sense of ownership as a kind that one acquires out of need or want. But rather a sense of ownership similar to the feeling around an idea. It is mine because it is all I have and it is important to share.

This is a complicated sense to grasp and it is this indefinite and undulating nature that, to me, lends it a staying aura in my mind. Yet it is beginning to wane in my head.

So I resort to making for remedy. So as to not forget.



I am in search of things, in which I can hear myself.

It is still difficult to talk about why I have been thinking about my identity and making work about it. For me, I believe it's about fitting into parts I think exist - or, finding parts that I can relate to.

The construct of Ghana, as a geo-political thing of sorts, betrays minorities like myself. We are in some ways collateral damage, in a quest for liberation and a collective sense of self. We are the points that lie behind the lines on modern maps. We are the sympathetic strings of this cavernous space. We are amorphous, often on the fringes and sometimes unheard.

But simply put, I am in search of things in which I hear myself