When Ethel Tawe and I speak, she is calling in from her childhood bedroom in Tanzania. This is where her family was stationed as part of their work with the United Nations. After a year of uncertainty, she tells me it feels good to be based in the place it all started - right next to familiar markings on the walls and playful equipment.
As the child of two diplomats, home means many things to Tawe. Born in Cameroon, she’s since also lived in The Netherlands, Tanzania, Kenya, United States, United Kingdom, and Ghana and along with the stamps these places have left in her passport, they’ve also cultivated a respect for the power of culture.
“Something I’ve recently been watching which I love are African creation stories/myths, especially about Dogon cosmology on Youtube and random archives online. The Dogon have ancient systems of astronomy and sophisticated scientific revelations that preceded much of modern science and remain a ‘mystery’ to many. I think their culture and story is an example that encompasses many aspects of what I mean by ‘African Ancient Futures’. The solutions to our social, political, economic obstacles in Africa are here, and indigenous to us." she tells me, alluding to her first curatorial project, African Ancient Futures that was hosted at the Whitespace Gallery in Lagos. The month-long exhibition opened on February 28th, 2021 first in person, and later, virtually through a digital portal hosted online.
After a year of directing editorial initiatives for A2.O Magazine, this latest venture sees her expanding her practice into the curatorial sphere. Featuring the work of African contemporary visual artists Edward Lobo, Jamal Ademola, and Curtis Essel, as well as her own digital collages, the exhibition was centered around Afrosurrealism. Tawe describes it as “a point of departure” through which the artists are able to “nurture transcontinental exchange, and engage the diaspora by highlighting ties across space and time."
Tawe first branched into the Nigerian art scene in 2019 as a content creator for Art X Lagos Fair. Given her background in International Human Rights and Development, she started to think more about cultural infrastructure on the continent. She began building a network of artists, writers, and creative producers that she would soon work with while editing A2.O and also collaborate with to bring projects like African Ancient Futures to life.
“So, Whitespace reached out to me and so I put together this concept. Actually, the title ‘African Ancient Futures’ is something I've just been sitting on for a while now. I don't even know where it actually came from. And it's interesting because I feel like ever since I wrote it down, I've been seeing it in different ways. So, maybe it might have been something that was around me subconsciously already,” Tawe reflects.
Having grown comfortable with mystery, her own work as an artist attempts to fill in the blanks of little known stories. “In addition to Tina Campt, Wangechi Mutu, and Saidiya Hartman, two people who are currently influencing the development of my collage practice are Lorna Simpson and Frida Orupabo. I particularly love their interest in the absurd, streams of consciousness, and colliding personal and found archives in a very public process. The idea of exploring form and recontextualising images through analog collage-making is what I’m intrigued by aesthetically. They’re also able to move beyond responding, reacting - although political realities of complicated Black experiences, and even violence, are very much addressed in their work,” Tawe explains.
"I'm very much on a journey, very much exploring many different things."
I vividly remember coming across her digital collage series, Holding Our Ground: Voices for Food Sovereignty (2020). The collection tells the stories of 13 African farmers across Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Senegal, and South Africa, and their journeys to developing the practice of agroecology while navigating industrial agriculture. A beautiful body of work that I, alongside her other followers, received an impactful primer on the interpersonal effects of climate change and food sovereignty through these images she shared on Instagram. To engage with Tawe online is to be constantly learning something new. Some days it is intimate portraits of her and her friends braiding their hair with an indigenous African threading technique, and other days it is tea painting or shadow play. But regardless of the medium, distributing knowledge through art is at the heart of her artistry. Tawe has remained committed to highlighting neglected cultural histories, writing longform research pieces from ‘These are the women imagemakers in African history’ to the viral Instagram infographic, 6 LGBTQ+ figures in African history.
“In five years, I really hope to have a strong understanding of what my art practice looks like and how it exists in the world. I'm very much on a journey, very much exploring many different things, and even though I've gone back and forth when you're doing a lot of different things, it can feel kind of stretched out, sometimes just stretched thin. But I feel like I'm moving towards a centre that ties it all together, even with my human rights and development work. Sometimes I’m like, ‘why did I do that?’ when I want to be an artist, but then it's like, ‘oh, wow, OK, no, that's why I did that.’ I learnt something from it that I use now,” she shares, emphasizing the importance of her multidisciplinary approach.
After a successful exhibition and the continuing prominence of A2.O magazine in the African arts writing field, what’s next for Tawe in 2021? Movement. Prioritizing experiences and learning through community is high on her list for the rest of this year. As her skillset as an artist grows, so does her stomping grounds, meaning there might be an exhibition curated by Ethel Tawe near you soon.