ZAMBIA LETTERS, 19

23/06/2025 

Yesterday I put ”Rannsakningen” aside and picked up Norén's diaries instead. I don't know why, but it may have something to do with the prose being so invisible in the format. It's the kind of text that's easy to skim through when there are so many other impressions that needs to be processed.

We received a brief message on WhatsApp from Chibweka, which we're trying to understand. He writes that he's going to arrange a Mukunda, with the addition "as I told you", and that he needs 570 K for rice and oil. He instructs us to send it as soon as possible. We're a bit taken aback because we can't remember him saying he's going to arrange a ritual and it's unclear to us whether we're invited or not. The tone of the message is curt and commanding, but that could be due to language barriers. If we get a chance to see a Mukunda, that would be fantastic.

Sat in front of the screen for a while today, reading up on the intricacies of the world. The war between Israel and Iran is in full swing. There are major forest fires raging in Europe and a life-threatening heat wave is raging in Spain, where my mother lives. My social media feeds are full of denial posts. They compare what is happening today to heat waves that happened a few years ago, with the aim of relativizing it.

Did some hand washing in the sink because the electricity only comes on at 11:00 p.m. this week and we are out of clean clothes. I can't get the red sand off the white fabrics so I'm going to wait with the white laundry until I can stay up all night.

Hanna cooked dinner today with pumpkin and a local vegetable that I can't remember the name of.

25/06/2025

Today Irpa and I spent most of the day in the library doing Duolingo and math. We picked up a couple of embroideries from the house that she and Hanna had started and tried to finish them, but they were made of paper and they broke when we pulled the thread so we had to start over. We didn´t finish them. I realized I can use Duolingo to learn Chinese and Japanese and we started playing around with it a bit. She thought it was fun so it could be a way for us to learn something together.

Hanna was off to a lecture that Victor was giving at an institution in town. There were several points on the program, besides him, so there were a lot of people at the event. Mr. Makashi was there, but he didn't recognize Hanna (hard to believe, she was the only white person in the room, and he looked her straight in the face, but for some reason he didn't notice her) and Dr. Ghankanani. Victor said things to be mindful of when pursuing your artistic career, such as to never lose focus on your path, to know your inner drive and to maintain and nurture it. To treat all thoughts as if they are valuable. “Know yourself, what you do, why you make art. You have to know your work very well.”

“Go back to your child. What made you start?”

He also gave a few concrete tips on how to write applications. ”Invite the person to your work. Don’t spend time explaining it. Trace your work to the field when you present it and explain your aesthetic origins.”

“Study the other side, don’t miss target in your application. Respect yourself, study the call, understand the game, but respect yourself first.”

He talked about how it is wise to help your friends succeed, because those who succeed are your network. If you see an application that doesn't suit you, then forward it to your colleagues so that things goes well for them. That way, you build the network that will support you.

Regarding the differences between the commercial scene and institutions, he said that galleries want depth and originality, while institutions involved in aid often want to be able to justify "social impact". They are not so interested in artistic strength., but want to see how that strength can give energy to something else.

He also talked about the importance of being careful with the flow on social media.

Irpa has been swimming in the pool a lot lately, but now her skin has become so dry that I am wondering if we need to take a break. She thinks it stings when we put cream on her.

In the evening, Hanna tricked me into socializing. She thinks I don't get enough of it. "We'll go sit in the bar and work, there's wifi there." As soon as I got there, I met Chowa, who lives in the area and spends a lot of time at the venue. The other day, he took me to his barber. Now, we sat up all night and talked about politics, the situation in Zambia and the mining industry. He grew up in Copperfields and has worked in mines, just like his father, in the administration, so he knows a lot about the subject. These days, he's studying to be an automotive engineer, or maybe a car mechanic, I am not sure, online.

26/06/2025

Finished the last details with the people who will be renting our apartment in Oslo while we are away. They are dancers from Olivie's ensemble who will be working with her in Oslo this summer. I have given them an outrageously good price, but I am happy to be able to help with the production and it feels safer to know the people who live there, so it is worth it.

A female director/performance artist/painter showed up at the library today. Her name is Serah Chule and she came with her boyfriend or fiancé. He has a store that sells smartphones and camera equipment. They are going to do a recording here tomorrow. I suggested that they should stop by Hanna's studio and it seems like the three had a good conversation.

Irpa has been playing with the children in the area all afternoon.

I sat down with Naoko. We discussed my interest in the mining industry and the climate issue in large. I told her I was trying to understand how the industry affects people and the local cultures. She then told me that she had lived in Aberdeen. According to her, it is a city characterized by shame. The city lived for a long time on the oil industry, but when it was phased out, as a consequence of climate change, the pride the locals felt for their work changed to negative feelings. Now the city is struggling to establish a new self-image and many inhabitants are suffering from depression. She said that there is another city in Japan, Yubari, that has gone through the same process. Yubari was founded around coal mines, but when they were closed down, the city was depopulated. Today, only a few people live in the city and it is difficult for them to visualize a new common local identity. She asked me if people experience it the same way in Norway, because of the climate crisis, since Norwegian prosperity is built on the oil industry. I said that my feeling is that Norwegians don’t care much about that issue at all. The last thing I heard was that they were planning to open new oil fields in the North Sea. I also told them that Norway has made a lot of money exporting gas to Europe following the war in Ukraine. That most Norwegians deny that there even exists a climate crisis at all. Her jaw dropped.

We took a Yango to Mosia-Oa-Tunya and bought raw materials. Ate pizza. When we came back, the guard at the gate came up to the taxi to check who we were. He offered to help me with the bags, but he was in civilian clothes so I didn't recognize him. I declined his help a little brusquely, because I thought he was a stranger who appeared out of nowhere.

Read Asterix and Obelix in English for Irpa at bedtime, translating it as I went.

27/06/2025

Did the elbow attacks in Snake. It was interesting, but difficult, because my right shoulder is overworked. There are certain positions in one of the movements, when I lift my shoulder, that has turned out to be unexpectedly stressful in relation to my injury.

Boiled coffee in the restaurant, as usual, while Hanna and Irpa got up for the morning. There is electricity there, even outside of normal hours. They should get a gas stove for the house.

Met the guard at the pool and apologized for snapping at him the other day. Explained that I had been in a bad mood and that it had nothing to do with him, which is true, but I didn't tell him that I hadn't recognized him. He took it very well and it was the first time we actually spoke to each other.

Today a counselor came to visit Hanna's studio. I was with him for part of the visit. We looked at her masks and how she explores pigments. He asked me what I thought about her work. I chose not to answer with opinions, but to tell him why I, and perhaps Hanna too, are interested in masks. That it has to do with a deep ecological approach and that we have an investigation of human identity as something material. I said that it is important to us that our masks are site-specific because they connect us to a certain environment. He then told us that for him, masks are ancestors and he asked us if we were aware of the problems concerning us showing masks in a white cube.

Hanna bypassed the question, since it has nothing to do with her work, and explained that she never shows her masks. They are “doers”, i.e. subjects who guide her painting work, and after a painting is done, she burns the mask and returns it to the place it came from, in the form of ashes. We have of course thought a lot about our position in this process, but unlike the modernists, who traveled to Africa to look for forms and expressions that they could bring home to make an impact on a Western art canon, we are not here to look for Zambian expressions to bring with us back home.

We are actually doing exactly the same thing here as we do when we work in Norway. That is: we work site-specifically with masks in a way that places our bodies in the landscape we happen to find ourselves in. So we bring a practice here that we can share and that can form the basis for conversation. At the same time, we are of course interested in the context and we want to get to know it, and we want to learn as much as we can about Makishi. But if we are trying to get something from here, it is rather experiences from meetings we have, as well as an understanding of processes and the ontology that lies behind Makishi, not the forms themselves. 

It is important to clarify this because the question came up so bluntly during the conversation. At one point, the curator said, in passing, that “when you are here and take something, you should also give something back.” It was a comment that perhaps highlights some of the layers of gaze directed at us, as European artists coming to Zambia. Hanna said something along the lines that she does not feel that she is here taking something but that she is part of a program and that her presence here also contributes to making the residency possible.

The question of who is taking what seemed important. At one point, he directed it at himself, saying “I feel it myself that I have to be aware of what I am taking when I am here in your studio.” 

”I feel we are having a conversation”, Hanna replied, ”not that you take something from me while you are here.” His comment suggests that the idea you are ​​taking something when you experience something may not really be a criticism of the relationship between Norway and Zambia, but rather a more general idea of ​​how experiences work.

After a while he told us an interesting story. At the time of the construction of the Kariba Dam, in the 1950s-60s, there was a powerful female prophet named Alice Lenshina in Zambia. She moved out into the wilderness with her companions to create a non-modern ideal society. This took place somewhere in the Central province and her congregation was called Lumpa church. The authorities intervened and forced them to turn back. This resulted in them shooting several of the Lumpa members. The curator said there are examples of other such female prophets who have had similar projects and who have also come into conflict with the church and the authorities, when they preach for example that Christianity should be inspired by traditional Zambian spirituality.

He also told us that between the 1920s and the 1980s, the use of masks was completely banned in Zambia. We had not been heard that before. This means that the current Makishi tradition is reconstructed and suffers from a broken transmission. When that fell into place, it became more clear to us why the use of masks is so charged in Zambian art, apart from the purely spiritual aspect of it. 

“When I see this, for me they are ancestors”

”When an artists come here they will think: ok banana fibers with paint on, I can do that. SO how to say not No don’t do that, but how to relate not process but the thoughts behind why it looks this way, that interests me, and are you guys even aware of the problem of showing African masks in a white cube?”

"You value something not valued here, something we take for granted. And when you do, I feel entitlement to it. And with Plato's cave... I suppose I want to bring the people in there out of it. Not shock but..."

Wrote some after lunch in the library. Joined by Naoko again. She told me that she is now living in Oban. I used to love that whiskey. "It is a small town", she said. "If I am walking with a boy, not my husband, people will ask me afterwards who I was walking with. And I was apprehensive of it, at first, but I have gotten used to it."

"Trying to find out what I can do, there is no contemporary art space, what contemporary art can be, in such a small place. I want to work local."

“I collaborate with a dye artist, exploring locally produced organic methods to produce dye, she is experimenting in her garden, we have an outdoor studio or workshop where we grow plants.”

She has just returned from Livingstone but she did not have the same experiences as us from the bus trip. Instead, she felt that people saw her as someone who had a lot of money and she found it stressful to be treated accordingly. This has also happened to her many times in Lusaka. She has met people very briefly who after contacts her via WhatsApp and asks her for money.

Our conversation about differences and similarities between the views on nature in Scandinavia, Japan and Scotland continued. She said that she had believed that Japanese and Scandinavians have a very similar relationship to nature and that she had been surprised by what I told her the other day. I said that the Scandinavian cultures have different experiences of, and views on nature. In Norway, as in the other countries, people have strong emotional connection to nature and they spend a lot of time in it. But nature is dangerous. It is something you compete with and measure yourself against, something you use as a mirror. The reason is that the Norwegian nature is more dramatic than it is in Sweden. 

And I don´t see much of a holistic or spiritual attitude towards nature among the Norwegians. Take the forest reservations outside of Oslo, for example. It is a huge area where you can do sports and where you will find many good spots for camping The whole area is littered with toilet paper. It hangs from the trees and lies in piles everywhere on the ground. You get the feeling of walking around in a big toilet. When you take a hike in the forest, you often meet people with headphones on their heads staring down at their smartphones, completely cut off from their experience. Young people go out into the forest to camp by the lakes, but they bring big loudspeakers with them and play bad music all night. When they need to collect branches for their camp fire, they go to the nearest living tree, tear off a branch and pour gasoline over it. There is a Norwegian saying: “Norge er til for å brukes”. It is a typical Norwegian expression and in my opinion that saying captures the mainstream Norwegian relationship to nature.

In the afternoon two visitors came to LCAC. They brought their car in and poured out of it as if they owned the whole world. The man was from The Arts Council, I don’t remember his name, and that the woman was from Nairobi. She represented a (Swedish?) organization that works to make governments in southern Africa to see the value of investing in culture and art. They told me that she had just failed to get on her flight to Livingstone, it was on her program but had been cancelled, and she was clearly frustrated about it. Her braces made her look very young, but I think she was in her 30s.

They wanted to see the exhibition with Marthin Phiri. I said that it had been taken down and then I showed them to Uzi who in turn was able to inform them that the piece with the coffin, the one where Phiri cast his face and staged his own Lit-De.Parade, was still upstairs in the gallery. It was really just the one they wanted to see, so they were happily satisfied and moved on to the next item on their schedule.

Hanna cooked dinner for us using local ingredients from the market. She soaked some okra so we could drink it for breakfast. I read more from Norén as Hanna put Irpa to bed but the power went out almost immediately,, so I decided to have an early night too.

28/06/2025

I was inspired by a post about Charles Bronson. He trained something called 1000-1000-1000, that is: 1000 push-ups, 1000 sit-ups and 1000 squats every day. I made my own variation of it: 1000 stretches, 1000 strength, 1000 attacks.

Today the guard was in full uniform. He went around sweeping the paving and picking up branches and leaves in the garden while I trained. I have to say that he has a very high work ethic. That also applies, by the way, to the construction workers who are working to complete the surface around the swimming pool. They are always up and running when I start my training and they work non-stop all day.

Hanna and Irpa couldn't drink the okra slime, it was too nasty, but I swept mine. It's not something I’d gladly drink again, to be completely honest, but it wasn't impossible.

The children in the area arrived early today and Hanna took them into her studio with Irpa. They made masks from materials from the garden. After, she came to me and showed me a couple of films they had made. When the children lift their masks in front of their faces, they always, quite spontaneously, start using an unexpected and almost supernatural voice. But they make sounds, not words; a kind of strange sound that I haven't heard them make otherwise. That's exactly how I imagine the masks sound during a Mukunda.

We took a taxi to Mosi-Oa-Tunya and topped up the phone so Chibweka can buy flour and oil.

Chowa was supposed to come today and drive me to a Kung Fu school and show me it, but the radiator broke so it didn't work out.

Did the laundry but dropped Hanna's white T-shirt in the red sand when I was going to hang it to dry and I don't know if I can get it back.

Irpa and I swam together in the pool today. It was cold but she loves it. "Aren't you going to take a dip?"

Wrote all afternoon. In the evening I read Bilbo to Irpa. We are getting closer to the point when he meets Smaug and it is almost too exciting for her, but I think it will go well.

The dogs have calmed down. Every other night they have been barking at each other between their yards from 0300 to 0700 in the morning and it has kept me awake. The neighbor has a small Jack Russel, right below our window, and it has been stressful, but suddenly they stopped altogether, almost completely. I don't understand how come the owners don't go crazy about it, the noise must be just as annoying to them as it is to us, but I guess they're happy about the security it brings. 

29/06/2025

I was going to go to the toilet before training and chose to go to the public toilet at the gate so as not to wake Hanna and Irpa, but I surprised the guard while he was sitting there with the door open. He is used to having the whole place to himself at that hour. I did Bear: penetrating strikes and circle walk. Afterwards I cut up apples, carrots, cucumbers and oranges for breakfast. Hanna fried bread with cassava flour which was very tasty.

In the morning we went to visit Twin rivers. It is a heritage reserve outside Lusaka. Traces of pigment have been found in one of the caves, from the stone age, and Hanna wants to produce it to explore it in her practice. Luyando is visiting Lusaka so he came with us. Chowa had repaired the radiator so he drove us in his car.

It was quite a long journey and the last part consisted of a bad sandy road. We arrived at a village where Lozis live and they said we had driven too far and that the entrance to the reserve was at the previous gate, which went through a farm. The padlock on the gate was open so we drove right in until we came to a farm and then we honked the car.

It was a well-maintained farm and we spotted several cars and a tractor in the yard. A black woman came out of the house and she introduced herself as Mathilda. When we explained that we wanted to go up to the cave, on the hill behind the farm, she went to get “Mr Roberts” from the house.

Mr Robert was a white man. He apologized for taking so long to come out of the house. He had been painting, he explained, and I assume he had to change clothes because he was wearing a well ironed shirt and chinos. a pair of very artistic blue glasses rounded off the look.

We told him we were interested in going up to the cave and asked him if this was the right way.

“No”, he replied thoughtfully. “And you need a guide.”

He told us that there are families of Black Mambas living on the hill. I knew nothing about these snakes but he explained to us that they are aggressive, that they even pursue people, that they are relatively quick and that they have a deadly, fast-acting venom.

“They rise up to about a metre and a half and show the black inside of their gums, that is a warning, then you know it’s time to get out.”

“You need a guide and I have the man, it’s Mathew, my farmhand. He can contract a few men from the villages to walk ahead of you with sticks to swing over the path as you walk uphill.”

We decided on our feet to take his offer and come back another day. Before we left we found out a little more about him and Mathilda. It turned out that he was born in Zambia, that his parents had a farm in Kabwe when he grew up, but that he moved “back” to England for a period of his life. When they passed away, he moved back to take over the farm. Or farms. In addition to this one, he had six other farms with livestock.

He and Mathilda, who is a baker, are experimenting with growing natural wheat and he told us in great detail how it works. To start with, they have bought a small mill that they can use for experimenting. During the 1940s, farmers began to use a new type of mill that doesn´t work by crushing the grain between two large stones. This meant that they were able to remove the husk from the wheat before grinding it. This in turn meant that they could produce a fluffier and tastier flour. But the problem is that it is in the husk that a large part of the nutrition and vitamins are located, so bread also became less healthy. He and Mathilda have returned to making a coarser flour. The challenge has been to get it as fluffy as the commercial flour but they feel they have found a way to fix it. He offered us a few slices of their bread and it tasted fantastic, somewhere between wheat and sponge cake, but coarser and not as sweet.

He also gave us a quick introduction to the conditions for growing wheat in such a warm climate. Apparently you can grow it during the winter months, which is the dry period. Most farmers alternate this with growing corn during the summer months, since corn can tolerate moisture and is from the same family as wheat. We were shown the samples of shoots that he had taken from the soil and he explained the characteristics of the grain to us.

Before we returned to LuCAC, he told us about others who have visited him and Mathilda. Geologists have shown great interest in the area and they have also managed to demonstrate that there is a bored lake on the other side of the road, which was filled with water 300,000 years ago. That explains the stone age settlement at the hill top. 

We got their contact details and will come back with a more organized proposal for an expedition at a later date.

In the evening, Hanna and I cooked dinner for Naoko, Chowa and Rachel. It was simple. We did pasta with broccoli, string beans and onions, but they appreciated it. Irpa didn't want to read Bilbo tonight and I suggested Pölsan to her as an alternative, but she didn't feel like that either, so we ended up just lying down and talking about high and low for half an hour before falling asleep.

30/06/2025

Discussed our meeting with Mr. Roberts with Uzi. She suggested that he probably lives in a fairly close symbiosis with the tribes in the area. They depend on him and he has a responsibility to help them with various practical commitments such as the organization of certain smaller public facilities. He is expected to take care of them. In return, he can rely on them as paid labor for his farms.

Hanna was invited to Serah today for “Culinary therapy”. It involves meeting and cooking together. Apparently it was a very nice experience. She met a couple of Serah´s friends and relatives and she learned about Zambian cuisine.

I wrote for most part of the day. Irpa was kicking ball with Peter, one of the children who visits us.

Naoko told me she had been to the Kung Fu school with Chowa. She showed pictures from the visit. It is not just any school, but a fully equipped Shaolin temple. Judging from the pictures, it looks to be very large, with a spacious paved courtyard in the middle. The buildings are not inferior to the temples in China, either in scale or in the details. From what I can see, this is a complete and fully legitimate Shaolin temple, with golden Buddhas and spacious pagodas.

There were children there as well, who trained while they were shown around. The guard who let them in explained to them that they are street children who live at the temple. They train Kung Fu twice a day, but go to regular school between trainings. The entire temple is financed by a very rich Chinese businessman. He runs a hotel chain called “Golden Peacock” and the ambition is that this will become the largest Shaolin temple, even the main temple itself, in southern Africa. The goal is to build more temples in Kenya, Zimbabwe and Botswana.

Chowa joined us. He reflected on other things that the guard, or perhaps the monk, had told him. That it is taboo to eat meat in the area, that Buddhism is about living in peace and compassion and that the children are trained to find their inner peace.

“In many ways it is the same in all religions, all spiritual traditions” he philosophized. “Many of the things they speak of can also be found in Christianity.” Then he turned to me. “Is that why you are a vegetarian? Are you a Buddhist?”

I have to visit the temple, as soon as possible. Maybe Irpa can train together with the children? We could drive her there on the weekends.