This was originally written in 2019 while I was living in Tamale, an industrializing city in the northern region of Ghana.
When I walk by used electronic repair shops, I usually stop and talk to the dudes working outside. They work under an aluminum roof, taking apart old fax machines, blenders, printers, and other dusty equipment. “Do you know any people who take this equipment apart and make art with it?” I ask. Similarly, I stop and talk to the older men who run the music shops all over town. Most of the shops have names like Ottis Music or Relax Music, and sometimes phrases that don’t carry grammatical significance. Ghana was a British Colony, so it is an English speaking silo in the otherwise Francophone West Africa. Ghana is also a Christian country as a result, and by some global indexes, it is the most religious country in the world. That said, northern Ghana—specifically Tamale (pronounced Tom-uh-lay), where I currently live, the fastest growing city in West Africa—is heavily Muslim, and most people speak the local dialect Dagbani more frequently than English. There are other languages spoken too, such as Ashante Twi, one of the most common dialects in Ghana.
So, there are other reasons—besides the fact that most music shops carry more electric fans and motors than music—which make for a rich, material-semiotic experience at these places of business. The electronic repair folks don’t understand the idea of making art from electronics, and there is one person in town that makes sculptures from metal who is often suggested in response to my question. These shops are curious places to spend time. Building materials and infrastructure are of a different grade in this part of the world and normalizing a baseline for what constitutes “good” and “bad,” “safe” or “dangerous,” “clean” or “dirty” space is a complicated task that requires time and openness. To be clear, Tamale is a very “safe place,” in the way that westerners tend to discuss safety in the Global South. The most dangerous thing by far in Tamale is the motorbike traffic–and it is very dangerous. Dust is everywhere; Tamale is a distant gateway to the Sahel, a desert transition region that encompasses the surrounding Senegal, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and other West and East African countries. There is always dust in this 100 degree sub-desert ecoclimactic zone. But, it is January, which means it is harmattan season in Ghana. The time of year of dry heat, cool 90 degree nights, and visibility-impairing ambient dust storms. So, the aluminum covered, outdoor electronic workstations and music shops are generally slicked with a powdery, burnt-orange and bronze colored sand.
I bought a tape player during one of my first days in town. There is quite a selection of old, unopened, cassette tapes. They are mostly highlife and gospel music. Gospel, here, does not resemble the genre one might associate it with in the United States, though it is very much music of Christian worship. Hiplife is Ghanaian hip hop and a strong tradition of it began to grow in the 90s. In many of these shops, there is old and dusty stereo equipment that is most certainly for sale but might not work and has probably not been moved since some of the tapes were produced. I find these places to be quite peaceful and enjoyable spots to chat and learn. They are quite gendered, though. There are some very charming social habits in Ghana that challenge gender normativity in the U.S., nonetheless, Tamale is a very gender-stratified place. That said, I want to say on the on set that Bay Area concepts of critical race theory, decolonial discourse, and intersectionality cannot be arbitrarily grafted onto Tamale, or Northern Ghana. Life here includes its own set of complex relationalities and agencies; local, tribal, regional, national, and international interdynamics; including my own presence; including representation and mediation. Of course it does.
I’m beginning to formulate a theory of media-information related to the materiality and history of shea butter, one of the only major global exports in Ghana, and a fundamental life practice of polyphonous forms. Everyone uses shea butter; it gets so hot people must moisturize their skin else it cracks, hardens, and drys. People put it on their feet, then put on socks before they go to sleep at night. But, shea is also an important part of the history of illumination: an earth media. Prior to industrialization, clay lamps burned shea oil for light. I had assumed paraffin wax was burned here until electrification, I was wrong.
The amount of goods—earth materials, plastics, textiles, or food—woman carry on their heads is astounding. And the streets are not for the faint of heart; motorbikes, three-wheeled yellow yellow taxis, and sometimes flatbed trucks frequently drive along the “pedestrian ways” against traffic; sidewalks are not a thing here. They honk at everyone, and they do not stop. Well balanced life-goods, atop the heads of women of all ages (and sometimes men) maneuver their way through the living maze that is Tamale city streets. This is to say, the pleasantness of the time I pass seeking out media-art practices in the various types of electric media stores in Tamale tend to be gender-enabled, or at least gender normalized. There is an interesting energy exchange that happens in public that defies this gender stratification: strangers helping each other stabilize large objects on their heads. Today, I saw a woman balance on her head—with the help of Amin, the man I was walking with—a stack of 3 empty crates measuring 3 feet wide and about 8 feet tall all together. Try to picture that. These exchanges happen based on whomever happens to be within spatial proximity.
There was a recent art exhibition in Tamale, titled “Northern Ghana Life,” curated by Nii Obodai, founder of Nuku Studio. The space was an old printing press, a long and narrow attractive building, in all its crumbling dustiness. It was a photo exhibition, part of Nuku Photo Festival occuring in Accra, Tamale, Wa and Kumasi and featuring eight Ghanaian photographers, including Nii’s work, two French photographers, and one U.S based photographer, each focusing on a different region of Northern Ghana. I was given a tour of the show after it had closed by one of the exhibition volunteers, a Maltese ex-pat married to a Ghanaian. She is a painter and says there is very little understanding of contemporary art in Tamale. She also tells me that there is, however, a modern art museum being built in Tamale, by a famous Ghanaian artist who is investing in modern art infrastructure for his hometown.
The idea of contemporary conceptual art does indeed seem secondary to just about everything else in Tamale. There is a Taxi driver who is the go-to for many foreigners living in Tamale, a large regal man named Dhubia, who drives a beaten up old car, but will take you pretty much anywhere. He recently drove me to a village an hour outside of Tamale and waited for me for hours while I was invited to observe a location shoot for a Tamale independent film studio, more on that soon. While driving the long burning road, Dhubia explained to me how much market vendors make a day and how much taxi drivers make a day. In short, market vendors make about 10 cedis ($2 U.S dollars) and taxi drivers can make up to 50 cedis ($10 bucks). Also, 80 percent of the country is illiterate. There are open sewers on the nicest of streets in Accra. Conceptual art, media art, I’m sorry to say are luxury topics. This coming from a person (me) who runs an art org and believes art practice is a necessary condition for the emancipation of equitable life and possibilities of existence in non-binary ways.
But, I have a different thought. I think it is a mistake to attribute significance to “modern art” as the preeminent example of contemporary art practice. What I mean is: life practices shape where certain domains of culture are performed. Complex conceptual thinking surrounding an art practice may not happen in northern Ghana in the social space that “moderns” may be accustomed to seeing it—namely, the gallery space, the museum, the cultural center, even the DIY, “Third Space,” or community collective, that the more radically-minded might prefer. Knowing whether or not “conceptual art” happens in Tamale may be limited by my ability to conceptualize a new space that might house it. For example, I was in Accra for new years eve. During the day, that city is a chaotic, vibrating oscillator of movement and sounds. I was excited to experience the streets of Oso, the district we were staying in, as the ball dropped. As it happens, the streets were quiet and abandoned at midnight. Ghana might be the most religious country in the world; for new years, everyone was in church. If I wanted a wild fun time, probably, I should have been there too. My point is that cultural happenings happen according to their own logic, and don’t give a damn about material-semiotic signifiers of the “outside.”
So, I keep talking to the electronic repair folks, music merchants, and also to the women who make and sell the abundant clay pottery. Gospel music is a pretty fun time here and maybe the nuanced media art practice is actually about shea butter. Pots are used here to store and cool water. The clay and shape of the pots cool the water inside, which in turn cool the surrounding ambient temperature: another amazing earth media. I’ve been using pots to propagate snake plant (sansevieria trifasciata), one of my favorite hardy indoor air-filtering plants. No one keeps indoor plants here. The concept of “indoors” doesn’t really exist—in the sense that there are available spaces entirely free from the harsh elements. Infrastructure is both a luxury and a natureculture phenomenon. But, the air quality is quite intense and not only because of harmattan. There is no infrastructure for trash. Most trash, including cans and plastic, is burned. The ground is an orchard of plastic bags. Trash also ends up in the open sewer drains, which coagulates in unpleasant ways. Snake plant grows outside here, and it is easy to use clippings to propagate new plants: using the earth to clean the air, filtering earth information in usable ways for different bodies.
The women who sell pottery have asked me to be their friend. First, an older woman, then a 13-year-old girl, who invited me for a meal on Sunday—I think at church, which is like an eight-hour affair. There is a very specific and interesting tradition of ceramics in Ghana. My friend Isobel, who is an amazing ceramics artist in Oakland, sent me an article about it without knowing my interest in it here. For various reasons, I do think people find my use of the pots odd, because like conceptual art, there is no concept for what I’m doing. The feeling is mutual: I lack the concepts to comprehend much of the practices here.
I was drinking a beer with some local kids in front of the tourist art market. They are Muslim and don’t drink, in case you were worried. There is no tourism here, but there is a place where you can get tourist craft items and swindle with the deal makers. When I want to talk about media art, I usually start by talking about film and music. One of the kids told me that there is a Tamale Filmmakers group that meets at the Tamale Cultural Center on Sunday mornings. I asked my Maltese friend, Christine, about it and she introduced me to Leonard (he goes by O.b.l.), the only filmmaker she knew here. Indeed, Sunday morning was the group meeting time. But this Sunday, Obl invited me to location for what he described as a shoot for an epic story. He means a feature-length fiction film. Of course, I accepted, and he arranged to pick me up. But, the ride would leave at 6am on a motorbike, for a drive to a tiny village, Takpili, outside of the tiny village Fuu, about 45 minutes from Tamale. Did I mention driving on motorbikes in Tamale traffic is terrifying and life-threatening? I couldn’t get myself up for the task—in a hyped up, not early morning, sort of way.
Dhubia, my taxi-driver friend drove me instead. Along the way, I saw a man in the middle of nowhere, wearing (what I later learned was) a dashiki suite—the most fly, slim-fitting monochromatic, cotton pants and long shirt set I’ve ever seen. When we arrived in Fuu, we had to ask for directions to Takpili. The villagers knew about the shoot, they wanted to come. Dhubia made one of the old women burst into laughter. He told me the joke later, I didn’t understand. Along the way to Takpili, a dirt road, there was a bushfire. It looked fine to me, but Dhubia was freaked out and we sat in the car for about 20 minutes to let it burn. Dhubia’s taxi does not have air conditioning. His five-year-old daughter was also with us, because he is a single dad. That appears to be rare here. Golden brown and red hawks stalked the fire while we waited.
When we arrived in Takpili, Obl and his crew were resting from the heat of the midday sun. They had completed a morning shoot and were going to do an interior shoot soon. The first thing Obl said to me was, “I didn’t think you were going to make it.” That made sense. I was pleased that this was his response, instead of the foreigner pulling up in a taxi who was unwilling to ride on the back of a motorbike for 45 minutes. Obl’s studio is super interesting. They shoot all sorts of projects, commercials, documentaries, and fiction. They train crew and actors and trade the education for work on independent film projects. Their goal is to bolster the baseline of the Tamale film industry. That industry, I think, is just them and the NORDRAFIM association, but they say their work has received Oscar evaluation. I reviewed some of their footage from the morning shoot—it was for real. They were in the second week of three to four weeks of production, living in the village Takpili. They were making a fictional film about witchcraft for a modern Tamale audience. The film follows a witchhunter—a “good” witch that uses their powers to find “evil” witches—and engages with the ethical complications of these categories. They were shooting in Takpili because it is one of the few remaining villages that still primarily has thatch-roof huts, as opposed to aluminum roofs. The film is in the local Dagbani language. Don’t be fooled by the signifiers of the image, the actors are “urban” Tamale residents portraying traditional villagers. The complexity of Obl producing the shoot at this location was, I confirmed, almost as complex as if I endeavored to do so. Different worlds all abound.
Media art is not film production, nor is it music. But, I’m taking the long road to finding media art practices in Northern Ghana. I’d like to see this as part of a larger commitment to decolonizing concepts, one that I take seriously with regards to infrastructures of standardization, such as concepts of time. It is entirely possible that the most interesting media art practices in Tamale happen by the minister—or his A/V person—at church or the chorus of sonic amplification of the call to prayer from the many mosques. I’ll go at some point, and try to figure that out. The point I mean to make here is that I want to take a closer look at what is meant when calling something media art. I’m less interested in the mediums that this involves, I’m already well convinced that life-exchange is media, whether that means shea butter, ceramics, air-filtering plants, or harmattan. Rather, I’m interested in the way that the concept of media art, and really art in general, carries a set of culturally informed place-based containers. In some ways, this is already quite obvious too, take the white cube of the gallery for instance, and even the artists’ studio. The history of western media art is one that sought to escape, and also to validate itself, as a practice outside of those domains. But, I mean something different here. I want to get at ontologies of life practice—the nature of the nature of things. When Northern Ghanaians talk about church here, it might not carry the same empirical categories of existence that they do when a Christian, or Muslim, in the U.S. talks about church or a Mosque.
Juju is a thing here, for example, and by that I mean Ghanaian witchcraft. It is a normal, common part of existence, for Christians, Muslims, the Dogamba, and everyone. Some of the women who I buy pottery from told me that I can find witches at the witchcamp outside of Tamale. These are places where women who have been given the scarlet letter, for some reason or another, are ostracized. They may be witches, they may not be, but these are places of punishment for socially unacceptable behavior—a vague and terrifying concept. Often, this means nothing more than a widow who does not have a husband and thus has been labeled a witch. So, when is Juju “good” and when is it “bad”? I’m not sure; it seems fluid and grounded in a conceptual framing of the world—an ontology—that is simultaneously expansive with regards to what is, animist, exploratory, etc., and confoundingly restrictive, conservative, and traditionalist.
In this space, what is called media art—that is, an exploration of the aesthetics, ethics, and possibilities of media technologies, infrastructures, histories, materialities, and more—might very well be occurring as part of some practice I lack a conceptual relationship to and thus lack a capacity to comprehend. I hope so. I will keep looking. I think, what I am seeking, is not a thing, but rather a set of relationships to ground me with/in. Maybe a “grounding” is the wrong metaphor. When I find the right metaphor, I’ll be closer to understanding.
The Sunday after the film shoot, I went to the NORDRAFIM meeting. Obl had informed them I would be coming and introduced me to one of the association’s presidents, but when I arrived, I stepped into a room of about 50 Ghanaians watching a group of models training to do a fashion catwalk. It was unexpected. There is something wonderful about a small collective in a remote city working all together on film industry skill sets. You don’t typically have cinematographers and directors participating in the same workshops as beginner fashion-model walking, for instance. I was unprepared for this. But, the president introduced me, a kind gesture because he did so in English despite otherwise speaking in Dagbani. They asked me to say a few words about my work. Then, I walked that catwalk.
