Collective Cares: Studio Visit #004 – Mwaba Chandia

For the 4th studio visit of Collective Cares, Naoko virtually visited Lusaka-based artist Mwaba Chandia. The conversation focused on Mwaba’s two recent pieces, which were informed by materials from the natural surroundings of the artist, including seedpods and sheaths of trees. Please click here to read Naoko’s reflection.

As they exchanged, the conversation touched and critically explored: relationship with materials beyond authority and control; politics of display and representation; and the challenges around traditional crafts.

Studio Visit is a series of reflections to encounters and conversations with artists/practitioners in Zambia, organised by Collective Cares. This is, however, not a series of mere recordings or documentations of visits. Through creating a critical response to the encounters or conversations, the series explores a way of working or thinking together that values relationship over extraction, conversation over interview, and care over capture. Studio Visit is a cultivation of conditions under which thinking can happen, knowledge can be shared, and solidarity can grow.

Image credit © Mwaba Chandia