Artist: Banji Chona

Curator: Julia Taonga Kaseka

An exploration of the Zambezian and Mopane Woodlands, Southern Miombo and Riverine Forests as ancestral altars and planes in which ancestors live on and commune. Leaves, soil, reeds, anthills and clay are their medium; the antennae to which we have to attune in order to open up to the messages of the guiding spirits.

The ancestral altar as a teacher and as the lesson. The constant shifting and changing of the seasons; the swarms of altering insects chirping incantations soft and shrill. The ancestral altar as a rebellion to the teaching of the Western institution and education system. The ancestral altar as accepting the living and tangible presence of ancestors; giving them agency as repositories of value.

Creating a space in which the ancestral lessons seen and represented by various forms of botanical material are transitioned into an external space; though they are taken out of original context their story remains. Form changes and shape shifts are unavoidable ripples of consequence in the sequence of nature; even though a tree sheds its leaves, it remains a tree. The same approach is being taken when unravelling the concept of memory, memories will morph and deteriorate, as nature does and as nature intends, but will continue to hold their value within the cycle of time. The artwork is already in morphed form, and will continue to morph within the exhibition space, another reflection on our collective approach to preserving history/culture/thought/object.

The ancestral altar as ever giving; a botanical banquet for ancestral spirits to commune. Knowledge imbued in the forest as a source and resource. A key to memory boxes, pre-programmed to decodify the syntax of the inner workings of trees. Ancestral intelligence as being present in the flora; a portal that allows entry into the reworking of ancestors as past entities. One that holds the forest as a living entity in which ancestral spirits and practice are being kept alive. The forest is a place that remembers, and reminds us to remember.