Maputo Diary

I grew up in Maputo, Mozambique, in the victorious aftermath of the War of Independence, and in the early days of what would become a 20 year long devastating civil war. In kindergarten I stood united amongst my Mozambique childhood friends shouting “long live the revolution and the Mozambican people” with our fists raised to the sky. But at the same time, I knew I was different. I didn’t have a family member that had been killed in the civil war. My Danish parents had chosen to relocate to Mozambique on a wave of revolutionary euphoria, and could just as easily leave again. When I was 15 I moved back to Denmark with my father. My mother and younger sisters stayed in Maputo. Since 2000 I have been based between Copenhagen and Maputo, photographing the series titled Maputo Diary.

Maputo Diary interweaves social documentary and artistic investigation through intimate portraits of friends, family and places of meaning. The pictures are infused with a feeling of familiarity and yet a longing to truly belong. All photographs are shot with a medium format analog camera, and often with flash. The color palette is saturated. The compositions are calm, and radiate a simultaneous waiting and smoldering atmosphere, as if time has stopped. The portrayed meet us with a rare vulnerability and honesty - we are close, often right under the skin. We see suffering, hope and love in Maputo.

Maputo Diary is my own story about coming to terms with a complicated belonging. Maputo Diary is also the story of the people portrayed. It follows my sister who grew up after the end of the civil war, and whose upbringing, to an even greater degree than mine, has been characterised by being in a privileged position as "white" and never fully accepted as part of the reality that is one's own. It's about my mother who started as an idealist and ended up as a disillusioned and lonely woman.

Maputo Diary is also about the Sisters, the young gay and transgender men I first met in the streets in the summer of 2000, and have continued to return to. Back then, there was no word in the Mozambican vocabulary to describe what they were. That’s why they chose to call themselves the Sisters. Antonieta was my best friend. He and the other Sisters lived a marginalized and dangerous life. Antonieta died in 2004. Since then, many new Sisters have appeared, and unlike before, they now dare to show their sexuality openly. When I spoke to the director of the newly formed LGBTI+ organization, Lambda, he said: “Ditte; it was you who started it all ”.

Right now I'm in the overwhelming process of looking through thousands of photographs from the last 20+ years and choosing which ones to include in the overall narrative. But there's still something missing. I want to photograph the Sisters who are still alive and I want to document the political elite and signs of the war that is now waging in the north of Mozambique. The common denominator for those images will be intimacy. I need to collect testemonies from the people portrayed in my photographs in order to create both text pieces and an audio collage to accompany the images.

Change is essential for our common future on this Earth. There is a certain connectedness that is lacking - both to our fellow humans but also to the larger natural world that we are a part of. Maputo Diary represents my continuous mission to cultivate a feeling of connectedness and belonging.

As a child, I danced to the drums of the revolution believing with great intensity that as long as we stood together we could be free. And at the same time we heard the echoes of the civil war. Maputo Diary is my way of honouring my childhood belief and the lives of the people whom I photographed, many of which are no longer among us. They struggled to be themselves and to be free.