Street Studios
My grandparents and my two great uncles, along with my mother as a little girl in a photographers studio in Johannesburg in 1939.
All the years I was growing up, hanging in the hallway of my childhood home in South Africa was an old black and white photograph of my grandparents, my great uncles and my mother as a toddler, posing in a photographer’s studio.
They were recent economic migrants to South Africa from a small village on a little island in Greece. I would stare for hours at the photograph, my grandparents looking young and glamorous, dressed in their finest; at my 3-year-old mother, sitting obediently with curls in her hair; at the studio painted backdrop of a misty romantic scene. Though they had just left their whole world behind in search of a better life, to me they looked like elegant characters from a tale my grandmother would tell. This family photograph, of all the images I have, is my most treasured.
First created in March 2011, the Street Studio project is a communal family photo album which has set up free outdoor photographic studios on more than 20 street corners and public spaces around the world. In each community we visited we created public photo studio sets and invited any passing families and individuals to pose for a portrait.
The photos were then printed on site for free with a photo printer for the participant to take away with them for their own family album. From street corners in informal settlements in Cape Town, to refugee camps in the DRC and South Sudan, a working rock quarry in Madagascar, a few neighbourhoods in Mumbai, India, and parks and migrant shelters in Tijuana, Mexico, the studios are set up with the understanding that a family photograph can be a powerful and precious object.
Both a participatory art performance as well as a communal gathering space, the Studios are open and at the same time very intimate. By creating space for public displays of love and identity, they offer the community and individuals an affirmation of heritage and belonging. With thousands of photographs taken over an almost 8 year period, the Street Studio is an archive of family and love, an archive that documents not what makes things fall apart but what keeps them together.
Feon’Ala
Feon’Ala: Forest of Voices (2019- 2024) was a participatory art and research project created in collaboration with sociologist and artist Cecile Bidaud. Funded by the National Geographic Society the project aimed to build a multimedia archive of interviews, family portraits, and documentation of the legends and myths of the communities living at the forest edge of the eastern rainforests of Madagascar.
Feon’Ala hoped to show how the mythology of the rainforests is a invaluable knowledge resource and should be taken seriously by conservation scientists working in the region. We were also looking at the impact of large scale mining and agriculture was having on the environment and on the mythological world that sits on the precarious edge of extinction.
In 2023 Cecile curated a group exhibition at Is´art Galerie in Antananarivo. Together with 10 Malagasy and international artists, we presented the work we and others had done in the rainforest.
Cécile Bidaud – writing and installation
Alexia Webster – photography and video
Toky Andrianjafitsara and Miranto Rafanomezana – video mapping
Maherisoa Rakotomalala – art digital
MotaSoa – sound art, composition
Meghan Judge – video animation
Dieudonné Vonj – sculpture
Billy Head - poetry
BazouK - installation
Hélio Volana - sound creation
Taka Andrianavalona - sculpture
Hery Zo Ralaindimby - sculpture
Imalo Miakajato - installation
Finally in January 2024 we returned to the rainforest and the communities we had primarily stayed with whom we to present an exhibition of the photos and videos we had created.
The exhibition took place in a village school, and in a few homes with multiple re-screenings.
L’in dépendance
Je dépends de
L’eau que je bois
L’air que je respire
La terre qui me porte
L’esprit qui m’élève
Je dépends du fruit que je mange, de la personne qui l’a cueillit, de celle qui a planté et pris
soin de l’arbre qui l’a porté, de celle qui l’a transporté et de celle qui me l’a vendu
Je dépends de toi, de toi et de toi
A travers mes neurones miroirs, j’ai appris à parler, à marcher, à danser, à réfléchir et à me
nourrir
Je suis le résultat de tous ces liens que j’ai tissé avec des êtres en relation
Des êtres humains, des végétaux, des animaux, des minéraux, des esprits, des êtres
microscopiques et des astres de l’Univers.
Je dépends de moi
De mes émotions
De l’interprétation de mes émotions
De l’accueil des événements de la vie
De ma vibration
Je dépends de nous
De notre bienveillance réciproque
De l’ouverture de nos cœurs
De nos liens multiples, complexes, protéiformes et magiques
Written by Cécile Bidaud
Wall Piano / بيانو الجدار
In 2018 in Qalandia refugee camp in Ramallah, a frontline of the West Bank conflict, 12 year old Nada had an idea for a short film - a surreal reimagining of the nine meter high 708km long wall that Israel built around the West Bank in 2002. The resulting short, ‘Wall Piano’, takes us into the daydream of a child who lives under the shadow of a separation wall, showing the wall as something other than a brutal and immovable barrier. The film arose from a series of workshops with artists Asma Ghanem (Palestine), Christopher Marianetti (USA), Alexia Webster (South Africa) and a group of children living in the long-standing refugee camp.
Directors: Asma Ghanem, Christopher Marianetti & Alexia Webster
Music & Editing: Christopher Marianetti
Cinematography: Alexia Webster
Sound: Christopher Botta
Producers: Elena Moon Park & Found Sound Nation
Hogsback- A Village in the Clouds
In December 2021, for almost 2 months, I joined the crew of the Ocean Viking, a rescue ship on the Mediterranean Sea, as we patrolled this unearthly realm, looking for shipwrecked people stuck in a limbo between their past and their dreams of their future, a no mans land where many thousands of souls have been lost forever. During the trip we were able to rescue a group of 114 migrants that had fled Libya to try each Europe, most of them young refugees from the conflict in the Tigray region of Ethiopia and Eritrea.
