KESINONU - HERITAGE OF THE EARTH

Kesinonu Heritage of the Earth is a long term multi sensory research project that I have been developing since 2021 in Tové, my maternal village in rural Togo.

The title comes from Ewe language: Kesi meaning inheritance or transmission, and Onu referring to mouth or earth. Together, Kesinonu can be understood as “what the earth tells us” or “the knowledge the earth carries.”

Through photography and field recordings, the project explores daily rituals around water, fire and earth. I document these practices not as vanishing traditions to be preserved in a museum, but as living and sophisticated technical systems that have sustained communities for generations and continue to adapt today.

I focus on gestures such as drawing water from wells and streams, shaping ceramic vessels, and cooking on three stone hearths. These are not simple customs. They are precise engineering solutions: jars designed for carrying on the head and for natural evaporative cooling, hearths optimised for fuel efficiency and heat distribution, and clay filters that purify and store water safely without refrigeration. This knowledge is transmitted through observation, repetition and direct sensory experience rather than formal teaching.

This work is deeply personal. The women I photograph are my aunts and my grandmother, the same people who raised me. I am not an outside observer. I am documenting knowledge that nourished me as a child.

Since 2024, Kesinonu has evolved beyond still photography toward a spatial installation that combines images, multi channel sound (recordings of water poured into jars, clay being tested by striking, wood crackling in the fire) and potentially the physical ceramic objects themselves.

The goal is to create immersive environments where this embodied knowledge, felt through sound, touch, heat and smell, becomes a living experience once again. In doing so, the project asks: what do we truly lose when modern infrastructure arrives? And what technical sophistication exists in practices too often dismissed as traditional or pre modern?