mami wata said i was free, and other digital collages and text by baaba



the water garden, part i 


the humming from above, where God swims with us in haunting waters. there is something about the act of existence of my body underwater - the movement of being busy chasing that freedom in the abyss. and you never forget to face the sun, to surrender the gaze to the glimmer of the hot, summer days. to re-emerge with a skin covered of sunbeam scales , then, is the crossing of a portal. the memories, the stories, the humming. 

the water garden, part ii


the opacity of water, you see. water ain’t no mirror for you to be staring at. water demands you to flow, it demands the water inside you to become one, one with the ocean, one with the flow that knew you before you were formed in the waters of the womb. opacity requires you not to step in, but to dive/ to drown/to follow the flow. that same opacity of when you hold your tears in equilibrium on your eyes, trying to prevent water from overflowing. return to the source. 


View more of baaba’s static and dynamic collages on their Instagram @sun.sonics



from baaba:


These are three dynamic collages that could be used for "a merfolk happening", especially the water garden series! the Mami Wata one was something I experimented, and if you listen to it carefully you will hear Ghanaian folks singing - that sound comes from the exhibition done at the Pan-African Festival done in Algiers back in 1969.

baaba is a Ghanaian multidisciplinary artist and educator currently based in the UK. Her craft avails of visual and sonic poetics, expressed mainly through digital - both in static and moving form - and analogue collage art. The practice behind the acts of (de)constructing, (re)assembling, (re)shuffling images and words in her art is deeply spiritual, informed by alertness, resistance, wonder and tenderness, and rooted in the "unsayable". @sun.sonics works, as an ongoing motion, are aimed to materialise new modes of viewing and living reality through lenses that are no longer manipulated by the white gaze, allowing space for hope, stillness, and radical imagination.

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