Ground to Remember
Lagos Photo Fest
Lagos
“In a sense, we are unique moist packages of animated soil.” – Francis D. Hole
With this in mind, the exhibition project Ground to Remember is rooted in an organic and rhizomatic process of creative exchange between photographers Nii Obodai, Mario Macilau, Pippa Hetherington, and curator Nisha Merit.
What began as a visual and material conversation—conceived through digital meetings and studio visits—has taken form in the first iteration of Ground to Remember, presented at the 2023 LagosPhoto Festival. The exhibition considers three interwoven realities: the different countries where each participant is based (Mozambique, South Africa, Ghana), the unique circumstances the photographers capture in their work, and the commonalities the team has unearthed through their conversations. Ground to Remember presents individual works, collaborative pieces, and an expanded interpretation of the photographic medium. As an evolving exploration, the exhibition proposes soil as something integral to life—from the granular material that shapes geography, history, and memory to the ground as a bearer of the invisible and a nurturer between life and death.
The featured practices involve labor-intensive processes, long-term engagements, and a deep attentiveness to the subjects the photographers capture. The dialogue between artists and artworks is grounded in the aliveness of nature, understood as an active participant in memory, history, trauma, and our perception of the world. Ground to Remember offers a visual journey through these ephemeral traces, leading us through the artworks. This visual conversation creates a space of multitudes, blurring established notions and boundaries of photography. The images are understood as animated chemical processes, transformed into tangible objects that define both the photograph itself and its visual information as living realities—asking the viewer to think beyond the frame and toward the unseen.
Nii Obodai (Ghana) uses photography and the moving image to map out natural and social landscapes, anchoring visual nuances in time and space and engaging them as active participants in historical narratives. Suspended in time, his work presents a nonlinear reading of history. In his explorations, he visits places shaped by humanity’s need to control and supply. While we often see built environments, he directs his camera toward the natural elements and lifelines that sustain them. While Obodai solidifies the relationship between humans and the environment, Pippa Hetherington (South Africa) moves within the liminal spaces of memory. Excavating her visual family archive and highlighting the moments absent from the images that remain, she asks: What do we want to remember, and what do we choose to forget? Combining archival traces with her personal work, she examines the complex relationship between land and heritage. Mario Macilau (Mozambique) addresses the intricate realities of human labor and environmental conditions—the tension between consumption and waste, systems of religion and progress, and deeply personal moments of being. While these concepts can feel overwhelming in their scale, Macilau applies gentleness and deep curiosity to the stories he captures.
artists
Nii Obodai, Mario Macilau, Pippa Hetherington
team