Mizu

Mizu is an auto-ethnographic project that explores my family, Malawian heritage, and my connection to afro diaspora. Mizu centres around the themes of heritage, identity and memory, reflecting my journey in understanding my cultural roots.

Mizu, meaning “roots” in Chichewa, is an auto-ethnographic visual memoir, grounded in the fragmented mnemonic residues of Annie, Shola Katija’s Malawian grandmother. Her stories, while formative, arrive filtered through omissions, silences, and the epistemic debris of regime-based trauma. These narratives reflect the non-linear architecture of oral traditions, where memory operates as spectral recursion: dynamic, partial, shaped by displacement, concealment, love, and loss. Mizu is structured through affective image associations: intuitive, extrasensory, resonant dissonance. Photographs are positioned relationally, producing slippages between temporalities. One image may echo a memory; another may destabilise it. Shadows occlude parts of the visual field, staging acts of concealment that mirror incomplete transmissions of intergenerational memory. References are indexical yet ambiguous. Ambiguity functions as generative space, inviting interpretive suspension. Mizu enacts rhythm and deferral, embodying memory’s non-linearity. Images become conduits of symbolic latency, layered through ritual objects, ephemera, elemental imagery - resisting stable repetition, foregrounding the imperfection and sensory-driven nature of recollection.