Hole in the Wall – Everyday Lusaka

Hi everybody,

It has been about six months since this blog has been updated, and we are sincerely sorry for that. Things were happening – we were busy and we are sure you were too.

These past few months have been especially strenuous for Everyday Lusaka – we had to prepare for the Zambian Art and Design Show (ZADS), where we released six new products – folded cards, magnets, calendars, bookmarks, photographic prints and zines. Furthermore, we were hard at work preparing for our first photographic exhibition that opened on the 15th of December at 37D gallery, entitled ‘Hole in the Wall.’ It was a lovely event – we had great interest from many people.

In case you don’t know exactly what the exhibition is about, we thought it would be a good idea to talk a bit more about it in this blog post.

Hole in the Wall

Hole in the Wall is the culmination of a year’s work for Everyday Lusaka. We started this platform as a critical response to the current practice of photography in Zambia – one that focuses on wildlife, poverty or fashion, something we found to be a partial and overused agenda. We found ways to challenge this narrative by focusing on street photography in Lusaka, thus presenting a reality of Zambia that is urban and modern, busy and messy, but at the end of it all, very real.

Our exhibition is entitled ‘Hole in the Wall’ because we believe that our work acts as a hole into the walls that surround us, offering a vantage point to observe the different realities of Lusaka. The photography shown at our exhibition speaks of a Lusaka which we can all relate to. More than ‘relate’, we hope that you will be able to empathise, to look at these images and understand that there are alternative realities in Lusaka that are just important as ours, for they are still lived experiences.

We, Sana and Sebastian, are the main contributors and below are some of the photographs that are framed and on sale:

Springtime in Zambia by Sebastian Moronell

Tailor’s Desk in Kamwala by Sebastian Moronell

Roadside Capitalism by Sebastian Moronell

However, we have also incorporated three smaller contributors – Humphrey, Malena and Chamwaza – who are a part of our ‘Disposable Camera Project.’ This project is very important to us.

The Disposable Camera Project

Our disposable camera project is rooted in the realisation that there is a multiplicity of realities that exist simultaneously – you, reading this blog, have a completely different everyday experience as the seasonal farm hand, or the seasoned market lady. We wanted to make this statement visually – in a visual manifesto of some sort.

The problem is that we can only capture so much of everyday life in Lusaka. We have attempted to capture a reality of Lusaka, but at the end of the day that reality is filtered through our own biases, experiences and ultimately positions as non-black photographers. More importantly, we have come across this issue of access – we simply don’t have access to many different people and places around Lusaka. In response to our shortcomings, we came up with the idea of giving disposable cameras to people across Lusaka.

We gave disposable cameras to six individuals across Lusaka, all with varying backgrounds, the idea being that these people experienced Lusaka differently, thus their ‘everyday’ was different. This project directly ties with our overarching exhibition theme, ‘Hole in the Wall,’ for it is a way for us to break down the social barriers we come up against every day.

Armed with disposable cameras, we thought that they would be able to photograph their different and unique everyday realities, thus giving a fuller idea of what everyday life in Lusaka is. We only chose three of the six to exhibit with us – Humphrey, Malena and Chamwaza. Their objective was simple – photograph your everyday life, and to our joy, the results were splendid.

Our disposable camera participants and their images: