Prof. Dr. Pamila Gupta, Prof. Dr. Ute Fendler and Prof. Dr. Clarissa Vierke on Capital Art Studio in Zanzibar
Media records
Abstract
- Abstract
- Prof. Dr. Pamila Gupta talks with her hosts Prof. Dr. Ute Fendler and Prof. Dr. Clarissa Vierke on her latest project “From Indian Ocean to African Indian: Through the refracted lens of Capital Art Studio, Zanzibar”
People & roles
Origins & context
- Title
- Prof. Dr. Pamila Gupta, Prof. Dr. Ute Fendler and Prof. Dr. Clarissa Vierke on Capital Art Studio in Zanzibar
- Language
- English
- Podcast series
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Cluster Conversations
- Date
- July 17, 2023
Rights & access
- Extent
- 32 minutes, 19 seconds
Identifiers & sources
Further details
- Episode number
- 9
Full text
- Transcript
-
[music]
Speaker 1: Cluster Conversations, a podcast by Africa Multiple.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Cluster Conversations. My name is Clarissa Fierke. I am the spokesperson of the research section Arts and Aesthetics and professor in African Language Literature at University of Bayreuth. And today I'm here with my colleague Ute Fendler, as well as our guest Pamela Gupta. And yeah, probably I should give you the chance first to introduce yourself properly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, hello, my name is Ute Fendler. I am a professor in Romance and Comparative Literatures and Cultural Studies. And I'm very pleased to be here today in conversation with Pamela Gupta.
Speaker 3: Okay, and my name is Pamela and I'm a research professor based at the University of Free State in South Africa. I was formerly at Wiser, which is a research institute based at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. And it's really especially lovely to be here today because we first met, I think the three of us, in 2019 in Lisbon for a wonderful workshop. And then of course things took an abrupt turn. And so it's nice to finally be here in person and having a conversation with you on a fellowship for three months, May through July, working on a new exciting project on Zanzibar.
Speaker 2: Tell us more about the exciting project on Zanzibar.
Speaker 3: Of course. I think it's exciting. I hope it's exciting. So it's been a sort of long durée project where I have started with a colleague based in South Africa who's now based in Australia, Meg Samuelson. The two of us went to Zanzibar first in 2012 and subsequent visits were 2015 and 2018. And we got interested in looking at the history of a photography studio. And what's amazing about it is that its history goes from dates from 1930 until the present, run by a Gujarati father and son, Ranshad and Rohit Oza, who created a really sort of an amazing archive of works that documented everyday life in Zanzibar, as well as being commissioned photographers by the Omani Sultan, as well as by the post-revolution independent state. So what's amazing about this collection is such a range of images. And what I've been interested in doing based on these three sort of fieldwork visits is to really collect images, allocate them to the CAS Archive, that's the Capital Art Studio shortened version of it, and to figure out sort of what these images say about Zanzibar past, present and future. And to try and read some of the images in creative ways to say something more about what you can do with images and the idea of the expressive as saying something more than what the image actually itself contains.
Speaker 2: That's such an amazing archive. I mean, the Capital Art Studio. And I'm really so happy that you managed to actually work on it, which is already, I think, a very difficult thing to do. And it's such a special kind of archive since it kind of spans the whole twentieth century up to the present. So congratulations actually first of all on working on this and being able to do so. Let me start off with the first question, which you already have in the introduction to the Green Book, Decolonising Portuguese Decolonisation. You see, I remember books by colour.
Speaker 3: I like that too. That's why I chose the green color actually.
Speaker 2: So even so, in the introductory part you talk already, you make the distinction between photography of history and then photography as history. And I think that recurs, that also recurred in the cluster presentation you gave in 2000 and I think it was 19 even or 20?
Speaker 3: No, it was 2020. Because it was during the pandemic and I was supposed to actually come and present that work. Which is one of the chapters of this book. Thank you, Clarissa, for that wonderful question. Yeah, I think so. I trained in photography in my undergraduate in college and I think I didn't work on photography for a long time and now I'm revisiting an old sort of haunt of my own, but looking sort of more researching photography than actually producing my own. And I first wanted to address your point about the difficulty of this archive and actually being able to research it. Because I'm really grateful to my partner, Meg Samuelson, for sort of pursuing the topic jointly and I think that made it easier because...
Speaker 1: We would go and sit there and think, oh, the shutters are closed and he's not going to come out today or open for business. And then miraculously they would open the next day and we could go back and pursue our research. And, you know, again, we've—it's been timed over three visits, so it's been, you know, hard to organize and to really—to get Rohit to talk about his father because it's a difficult past, it's a complicated history, and I think one that these images tell really beautifully. And so I think this is where this idea of photographs as history rather than of history is an important distinction. It's something that Patricia Hayes has written a little bit about and I'm taking up from her. And I actually pursued it first in my book, The Green Book, as you referred to, entitled Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World, where I looked at a photo archive of a Mozambican photographer named Ricardo Rangel. And in those images I really felt like he articulated conceptually what I was trying to write about. And so I wanted to approach his archive, which is a very different archive of images, sort of in the sixties seventies period leading up to Portuguese decolonization, to say something about the matter, the physical material aspects of decolonization in the Portuguese colonial world. And so, when you look at images as history as opposed to of history, then you can really look at the materiality of the image, how it was produced, the paper, the image itself, you can read it in so many different ways that opens up instead of of history as a—I think when you use the word of history, you're documenting something, whereas as history, then it itself is a product of that history. So that's one distinction that I was interested in pursuing in that particular book. And I've sort of expanded that or building upon that—that concept with this project, which again is really about this, you know, very different place, very long durée archive, really playing with the images in a way that I didn't with the—with the green book. So I'll end there for now. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Oh, thank you. I think it speaks very well also to the concern in our research section where we try to think, well, part of it is aesthetics, so also in the sense of sensuous perception. So what do the arts in a very broad sense actually do? They don't just represent something, they don't just speak of something, but they speak in their own kind of particular way. And that is not easily translatable into language. So often, so to say, they grasp something probably like, now you refer to Rangel, like his pictures then did for Mozambique at a certain point, which is then you feel like, yeah, that's it. And then you basically have to kind of think, yeah, what exactly is it? And so I see lots of connections, so to say, to very prominent questions that we have there. Well, and I think even, well, you've also worked—or you've also engaged with artwork yourself as well, not only photography.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think what we mean by art is very complicated, right? And I think I'm trying to think about photography as a form of art and reading aesthetically, if that's—you know—and that's about reading against the grain, along the grain, within the frame, outside the frame. I mean, there's all sorts of techniques. It's about shades of gray, black and white, the tone, the affect. It's also bringing in sort of the sensorial reading, which I think of as more aesthetic. I'd say aesthetically attuned perhaps. Thinking about how you can imagine the whirring of a sewing machine. I wrote a piece that I presented on tailors and photographers and thinking about the soundscapes of those images and putting them into the reading of the image as being aesthetically attuned. So that's what I'm attempting to do.
Speaker 2: With the Kapital Arts Studio, one of the chapters will also deal with them with the concept of the darkroom. What I also found very interesting, I mean, especially the way you explained then to the process of taking photos and how you can link it to history. Could you maybe elaborate a little bit on that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I got really interested in concepts of darkness because I actually went to a conference on darkness, which was in Svalbard. And it was quite amazing. That was twenty nineteen, right before, you know, right around the corner happened. And the conference was physically in the dark. And it was all papers in cultural studies on darkness. And so we presented our work in the dark because it was the winter solstice.
Speaker 1: in Spalbard at the time. And I think that affect or feeling of being in the dark and thinking about darkness really sort of pushed people further in their research. So, I think that was really an important aspect of the beginnings of this piece. And I was also interested in thinking about, you know, we always talk about photography and the produced image, but what's happening behind the scenes and thinking about the physical darkroom. And it was partly based on a casual conversation with Rohit Oza one day about saying, oh yeah, the darkroom used to be back there. And it was also about a PhD student of mine who's doing, who's finished now, a brilliant PhD, who was thinking about the darkroom girls and the ways in which the gendering and the ways in which the women in the South African context were put in the back to sort of develop and the men were out front with the finished image. So I wanted to play with both those ideas and think about the darkroom itself and realizing that I didn't have that much information on the physical darkroom of Capital Arts Studio. And so the next time I went back, I was able to have a longer conversation with Rohit. And he told me very interesting details about that darkroom and where it was located and when it was moved off site and what the purpose of it was and the chemicals and the changing technologies. So it gives you a whole different history of photography in a way. And what I got interested in thinking about was not only the physical material space of the darkroom but thinking about reading for darkness in images. And I focused on images of the sky and the water and thinking about that relationship. And often, you know, one is light and one is dark and the ways in which compositionally you almost have that balance of darkness and lightness. And thinking about darkness implies lightness, thinks about, implies race, implies white, black, and all of those things. So I really use it to ruminate on sort of concepts of darkness and what other concepts they bring forth.
Speaker 2: Yes, I had the chance to visit the studio as well in what was that in April? Yeah, in April twenty three. When I was reading your article, which will be turned into this chapter, I also thought about this, I mean, this very sunny street and then you enter into his dark, very dark studio. So it's kind of you enter past the past and history at the same time, I mean like physically. What I found also very interesting. Just maybe another short question because in the beginning of our conversation you mentioned that the art studio is past, present and future. Could you say something about the future aspect?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Um, I think so Rohit Oza today sits with those temporalities and I think they're always in conflict. As I said, he's not the most welcoming person in that darkened space and that's actually a really beautiful point about entering into that darkness from the light. And I think he reluctantly became the proprietor and it was supposed to be one of his brothers who was to take over and he didn't. So he kind of got stuck on some level taking over his father's legacy. So his relationship to that legacy is complicated. And he's also very much protecting, so he's protecting his father's legacy in some ways. And I think he's taken it on and he's proud of it now and that's what he does and that's what he chooses to do. But he's also very much living in the present moment, which, you know, the role of a photo studio in Zanzibar today is not an easy space to function as a business. So he does a lot of passport photos, which are very boring and tedious work. So he still does his sort of, you know, street photography on the side and does weddings and does commissioned work. But, you know, it's not the same as his father's life, which was very rich as a street photographer and commissioned work compared to his own. But he's also very much controlling, I guess, the unfurling, if you can think of the dhow sort of sails unfurling as well, of his father's legacy into the future. So he's very much controlling what's happening in the heritage industry today in Zanzibar. So he's very selective about who he lets, he gives permission to to reproduce his father's images and in what context. And he's very disapproving of most of the sort of heritage industry attempts to try and colonize his father's images. Perhaps a little bit too much so in a way that they don't get shown enough because he should be more proud of them, I think, in my opinion. But it's something he's negotiating himself. And I don't see a likely heir. He's mentioned a nephew, I think, who doesn't live in Zanzibar who might take over at one point because Rohit right now is seventy-three. And it was great that you went to visit him because, you know, I haven't seen him since twenty eighteen. So just to see those images of him was really lovely. And he's aging, you know, gracefully, but he's aging. And I sent those images to Meg in Australia and she really enjoyed them. So she was really appreciative. So I worry a little bit, but I think there is a sense of who is the rightful person or heir to continue this legacy.
Speaker 2: But are they not also a lot of imagined futures if you want in the pictures? Like there are all these...
Speaker 1: I mean, on the one hand, so to say, the heritage, but on the other hand, then the statesmen visiting Tanzania in the nineteen sixties and seventies when the future is so wide open. And then you have the projects financed by the GDR, the blocks which he really there are these photographs which are so much they shout about modernity in a sense. And about a completely different future.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there's the future that he himself is trying to create and then the imagined futures in those images which are so hopeful. I mean, it's quite incredible. I mean, there's there's images in the studio if you look really closely of like Obama, not Obama, sorry, Clinton visiting. I mean, all of the state leaders and showing the hope of that future in the images themselves, even in that studio space. But it's what's interesting is that Meg has written about it being sort of, you know, an anachronistic. It's almost stuck in a certain moment of that hopefulness and then it just kind of dissipates and you can see the sadness there as well. And that's where that darkness comes back in and it kind of puts a veil over it and tries to shut it down at different moments. So yeah.
Speaker 1: Was also thinking now also reading this article also about, oh, you refer to it, the dark rooms of history. And as well, if you want, the dark sides of history as well because of course you can also wonder the many things left out, so to say, in the photographs or so to say the dark sides also even of Zanzibar town where of course you can kind of, I mean, you can look at this history from very, very different angles. But I think the metaphor, so to say, of the dark, the darkness works quite well. I mean, both what I like really is materially and technically as well as if you look at so to say the different histories there.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And I think that's where the darkness piece. I think what I am trying to do with this book project is each chapter sort of focuses on or exposes a different aspect of Zanzibari's history and that darkness is that moment of the revolution which obviously isn't darkness, it's light for other people, right? But the idea then that actually photography was sort of destroyed in that moment of darkness of the revolution. And since Ranshod Ozo was commissioned by the Sultan, he was then told to destroy all his images. So it was a moment of darkness in those ways too. So there's there's a playing of darkness in all these different motifs that happen through the history. And then I think other chapters will then focus on different aspects.
Speaker 1: It's an iconoclastic moment, getting rid of some imagery. I was very much reminded as well of Guernica's writings about the revolution as well as a very ambivalent moment or a violent moment as well for many families.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's incredibly violent and ambivalent for so many different people. And I think those histories are just emerging now. There's a recent book William Bissell and I cannot pronounce her surname, Torre, an edited volume that has a really important, it's a very important book and I think it's been overlooked actually, Remembering and the Voices of the Revolution. I actually have it here and I brought it with me. And it's an incredible collection for showing the different voices because it was so clearly seen as this moment of sort of the victory of the post-colonial state. But the violence of that particular moment of independence and what I would argue my second, the green book is what we have to think of the conditions of decolonization as shaping what happens after. And no one's looked at that except for this wonderful collection that's come out. So yeah, that's part of it.
Speaker 1: I was also wondering because it's also probably anachronistic in the sense of the community he is part of or so to say the Ozars who are kind of, there are just a few people in a sense left of the Goan community on Zanzibar compared to what did I read this morning, the nineteen fifties where they are like thirty thousand. And now it's a handful of families. So I wonder also, and you've worked so much on different diasporic Goan communities and Goans between empires. And also always stressing the fact that Zanzibar means a different thing for Goans compared to Mozambique, for instance. Could you...
Speaker 2: Yeah, certainly. Yeah, I wanted to actually go back first to the Gurna point. His books I think are really emblematic of the complexities of Zanzibari society and his own experience of leaving. I had the fortunate experience of being with him at StIAS, which is the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study at the same time in twenty eighteen and they purposely overlapped us. So it was really wonderful to be in conversation with a writer. And I always believe fiction tells you sort of theory in some ways. It informs it in a way that isn't articulated yet. So and he was, it was a really wonderful moment because he was able to point out one of the images and said Pamela, you've got the date wrong. I can see by the Standard Bank sign that this is pre-revolution, it's not after.
Speaker 1: That would have been sort of destroyed, taken down, and it wouldn't have been that bank anymore. So little details like that where the attunement of someone who's from there and knows those images and those streets is really quite amazing. Yeah, I ended up working on the Goan diaspora by accident, but not by intention. So my PhD was in Goa on a very different project on the history of the corpse of Saint Francis Xavier, a very long durée historical ethnography from the sixteenth to twentieth century. And I fell in love with Goa and I loved going there and I've written a little book on heritage and design in Goa that's a recent thing that's more an homage to a place that I know for twenty five years. And with that project I was interested in thinking about the complexity of your relationship to a place that you love and how you write about something as it's changing both good and bad. And as I moved to South African Academy from my training in the US and started working there, I realized that Mozambique afforded an opportunity to look at something that was connected through the Lusophone world to my previous research in Goa. And of course when I got to Mozambique I realized there was a whole Goan diaspora that I didn't really know very much about. So I became one of the people writing on that topic. And for me it opened up the space to think about decolonization realizing it transformed the way I saw Goa when I looked at it from Mozambique as opposed to just looking at Goa from Goa. And the ways in which sort of the Lusophone empire was an empire of diaspora in some ways and you couldn't talk about the elsewheres without they were being left out of the story and it was an incredibly important part of that of the of empire making in some ways. And then unbeknownst to me when I started working in Zanzibar and Oza himself was Gujarati and came over through these inter-imperial networks and trained with the Goans. So I had not known that prior to Oza's arrival from the late eighteen hundreds till nineteen thirties or so, all the photo studios were run by Goans. And so I got interested in what trades these Goans sort of took on. And I wrote a small piece about sort of the being modern and the ways in which Goans represented their Portuguese modernity and sold themselves as the sort of arbiters of or cultural brokers we could say between different communities. And had skills like professions like sewing, tailoring, photography, catering and running small businesses. And I got really interested in the relationality of tailoring and photography which I think is the piece I presented to you guys. And I've developed that one much more in thinking really about sort of tailoring history and photographing tailors and playing with those ideas. And what was so fascinating is that I found three generations of photographers, Goan or Gujarati with tailor fathers. And there was something about that work of adornment that mirrored the ways in which a tailor father would then produce a photographer son. I mean obviously not always but the fact that they're in the location and the proximity and the idea of cutting an outline in some ways is both tailoring and photography and seeing things the edges and the framings as very similar forms of artistry. So I am hoping this is my last book that deals with Goans but you never know. The next one might be around the corner.
Speaker 2: Do you want to—I found this—the concept well in that version of the paper that I read, the concept of adornment—a really interesting one. Could you say a bit more about that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. It's a term from Liam Buckley who is an anthropologist based in the US, I think James Madison University if I'm correct. And I had a small event on vernacular photography collections from India and Africa and I'd always loved his work. So I was able to bring him to South Africa for the event. And just meeting him and talking to him about his work. And he works on studio photography in the Gambia. And he was more interested in thinking about the relationship, the proximity of tailor shops next to photography shops. And he had a little bit on this idea of the surfaces and the edges. And I kind of wanted to push it further to really think about that relationship. And I since collected quite a bit more information on sort of tailoring and photography and finding it in really interesting places in South Africa as well. And often the same shops were used for tailoring and photo studios or the tailor would sell the back room to the photographer to use temporarily. There was something about those two professions that are really interestingly linked throughout I'd say the late nineteenth, twentieth century. And you know the Goans in Zanzibar, the images are incredible, these tailored dresses, outfits that they would make for the Christian community. And again I'm talking about a certain segment of Goan population that was largely Catholic. And I don't talk about Hindu Goans because they were less—they didn't emigrate as much to East Africa. But that's something that again shows the complexity of Goa itself as a category which is very complex to define and is always changing.
Speaker 1: Definitely.
Speaker 2: Should we say something about the three of us in terms of our Indian Ocean scholarship?
Speaker 3: Probably because, so to say, you have the converging point of also having visited India together and also working on the same and with the same artist, which I think also, I think this was the first encounter as well in Lisbon when Ute presented.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I actually had no idea that you'd been writing about him. And at the same time, I had written a little bit on him. So that was a really nice sort of moment of reverberation. And your ideas really helped me to think about that piece in terms of writing about his work.
Speaker 3: Maybe we can take it from there and say, because when we are talking about Subodh Kerkar and about in which way his oceanic art or as he calls himself oceanic artist, in which way this is a relational art. Do you think that we could also use this concept when we talk about the photography studio as a relational art maybe?
Speaker 2: Yeah. Could you say more on that, what you mean by relational art?
Speaker 3: Relational, at least what I used it for Subodh Kerkar is because he tries to put into his artwork always references and stories that always link the different places and spaces. So it's always Goa and Africa and Europe and Arabian countries and China. Actually, the whole world is there connected by oceans. In this way, relational. I mean bringing or using different kinds of materials, bringing it all together, but definitely also make it kind of visible and palpable, touchable for everybody to see and apprehend what does that mean that we are all connected.
Speaker 2: Okay. Alright. Yeah, I mean, I think because I've been going back to Goa and I met Subodh on my own and got really fascinated. He started this museum of Goa, Mog. And I think we probably both went around the same time, but we didn't know each other and started talking to him because he's a charming man as well, person who is very charismatic and the way he represents his art is really quite beautiful and he's thought through how to articulate what he's trying to do in this relational manner. I mean, I would say with just off the top of my head, I would say with Capital Arts Studio that I'd say Ranshod Ozo is much more relational and Rohit is less so. Because Ranshod is a product of that Indian Ocean flows and in some ways his work speaks to that complexity of Zanzibar within that space. And not that Zanzibar is less complex now, but I don't think Rohit is documenting Zanzibar in the same way that Zanzibar during Ranshod's era was looking outward more and Rohit's is looking at Zanzibar sort of facing inward onto the African Tanzanian mainland. So he's more invested in those kinds of localized dynamics that are relational in their own way, but not in that sort of referential globalized way that I would say Ranshod was more of a worldly subject in that sense. But what's interesting is that Rohit has such a keen eye of what his father was doing that in some ways he's making sure that those particular relational images are getting reproduced because he knows, he has a, you know...
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. That actually, that was the impression that I had. He's the one who would, I mean, I was sitting there for hours, not as much of course as you were. But then with each photography, he would say, yeah, but actually the story of this photography is, and then he starts telling, giving you the whole context. I mean, going back, not the context on Zanzibar, but this is then, just go to the next street, this is where my father took the photo, this is what happened in the meantime. So he gives the whole history, like more like a griot, you know, where the West African context and then... How did the griot functioned?
Speaker 2: Yeah, completely. Because he really, he can tell you the story of almost every image of his photos. And we decided he had a photographic memory because he knew the numbers, the cataloguing in his head of what image. So we would describe something to him, he said, yeah, yeah, let me, I'll come back tomorrow, I'll find it for you. And he would come back with that image because he knew which one it was in the catalogue. Yeah, and so the piece, just to round this up, the piece that I'm going to present in two weeks is on the concept of the crowd from the archive. And I was just going over our notes and Meg was amazing at taking down the notes because she was better at faster at typing it down because he would speak so quickly. You know, his descriptions, this photo, this story, and we have them all labeled. And it's quite amazing that he'll just add in one line, it completely transforms how you understand that image. And so you'll be seeing some of his beautiful images from the crowd.
Speaker 1: I'm just wondering, I mean, about the relational point and what I really like a lot and I think that speaks a lot to my thinking about Zanzibar and probably East Africa as well, this kind of layered idea. I think you quote Denggona as well at the beginning about the sediments, so to say, the archaeological sediments and how some get washed away and others in a sense get forgotten and so on. That very much speaks also to my thinking and I think one of the problems I have with Indian Ocean studies is always about the relations, as you say, outward, so to other parts of the Indian Ocean, but of course, so to say, we shouldn't forget that of course relations inward are as much part of the Indian Ocean as well because that's, I mean, that's what has happened as well in many, many Indian Ocean places, that of course we can't neglect the fact that there are nation states as well and they also impact on the particular histories as well. So what I like is very much, I think, the idea that, you know, looking at relations in different kinds of directions and...
Speaker 2: I think that's incredibly important because I think you have to look at Ranchod and Rohith and it's not right just to look at Ranchod because you need that anchoring back and you need, I think you're completely right, Indian Ocean studies has taken on this idea that it's global and it's everywhere and we're not doing enough of the harder work which is to look more sort of insular and so those archipelagos that are being recreated and created layered-wise.
Speaker 1: Or just others, just other relations because then of course the Cold War becomes extremely, the Cold War relations become extremely important as well on Zanzibar, which it's just a shift, if you want, of perspective, but it's also...
Speaker 2: It's there. We just aren't looking enough for it. But I do think there's a new sort of emerging work on Cold War and thinking about the impact of that in East Africa especially as well as Angola.
Speaker 1: I mean, it becomes very provincial, right? It becomes very insular, becomes also very part of this nation which is increasingly a strange beast in the twentieth century and then it also has these global connections. And still, of course, there's also Indian Ocean connections. People go to the Gulf to work, for instance, in the eighties as well. So yeah, I think that's what I really like about so thinking in, I mean, this cross-generational thing and really think about how these kind of relations actually change there. Yeah. Looking forward to seeing more pictures and...
Speaker 2: Well, I'm looking forward to showing more images and I've enjoyed the conversation we've had today. So thank you.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much and thanks for the conversation.
Speaker 2: I guess the conversations will continue.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure.
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