Syowia Kyambi developing her Kaspale project at Oslo Kunstforening

Syowia Kyambi in conversation with PRAKSIS’s Nicholas John Jones

NJ: Syowia, to start this interview, can you explain your priorities as you developed ideas for your residency?

SK: I was hoping to spend a month with people who work on similar themes to me, but maybe using different means: people who use archives and historical material as a point of reference in their practice, or who labour at the difficult work of excavating the past. Unravelling personal stories is burdensome work that sets up many different problems. It’s not often that you get to spend time focusing with others on related practices, discussing the difficulties and questions the work poses: what does your practice mean, what do the narratives signify, who are they for? It felt important to be able to discuss those kinds of things.

NJ: What did you hope the residency would offer?

SK: In developing this residency with you, I clearly started to see that I’m not alone in asking the questions I do about the subjects I research. I’ve been criticised for my archival and historical investigations because I expose information that some people find hard to accept. Additionally, those of us who propose historical narratives that run counter to normative accounts – be those Western or other – have to cope with being seen as representatives: they get handed difficult kinds of responsibility relating to their subject matter. But lots of people are at work on both public and private histories, in many ways, so I looked forward to having time for discussion, and togetherness, and some reaffirmation about my subjects and methods. It was very beneficial to know that I'm not navigating these issues on my own.

NJ: And so the title Carrying Histories…

SK: That title really fits, because it is a burden to work with historical materials, counter-narratives and speculative histories. Archival materials, like personal histories, are heavy. So Carrying Histories was an obvious title to choose.

NJ: Can you describe some of the ways that you deal with this burden in your own practice: for example, in the Kaspale project that you introduced while in Oslo?

SK: Since I returned home to Nairobi from Oslo, the project I presented there has taken on a clearer position. I’ve been collaborating with the artist and writer Neo Musangi on a project that grapples with collective memories that are not (yet) fully public. It concerns Kenya’s recent history and it reveals the many layers of violence that underpinned former President Daniel Toroitich arap Moi’s twenty-four-year rule in Kenya. The history of this period has been whitewashed. Moi and his regime have been made to appear peaceful and unproblematic, through processes of individual self-censorship and a national, collective state of censorship and amnesia that are played out and perpetuated – even today, following Moi’s death on February 4th this year.

The character of Kaspale represents one type of intervention that I’ve started to use. Kaspale tackles the twofold task of remembering and then narrating Kenya’s recent history, unmediated by a supposedly shared ‘national memory’. Kaspale is both an invented persona and a method: an extension of the self, and a necessary medium for telling stories that are hard to narrate and hard for others to hear. Kaspale’s origins are connected to me in deeply personal ways. She asks the work’s audiences to be witnesses as she reveals the trauma experienced collectively by an entire society. Her ability to communicate a ‘truthfulness’ has its roots in my personal experience of being raised under the conditions of Moi’s violent dictatorship. So this project is a truth telling, with a focus on women’s lives and the lives of many other people that Moi’s systemic and structural violence made ‘unliveable’, in some cases literally: it led to their deaths.

The name Kaspale mixes elements of German and Kiswahili, making her, and the work, multiple. This relates to Édouard Glissant’s work One World in Relation, in which he describes the power of creolization. ‘In creolization you can change, you can be with the Other, you can exchange with the Other while being yourself, you are not one, you are multiple, and you are yourself. You are not lost because you are not disjointed because you are multiple.’ This is a powerful, indispensable concept and method. Creating a creolized character made it possible for me to explore the unknown terrain of the instinctual, to go into dark places, excavate hidden narratives and reveal the ugliness in our humanity, and then ultimately find a way to heal from the process.

NJ: Reflecting on the residency after a couple of months, are there particular moments or aspects that are now stronger in your memory?

SK: I still frequently go back to the residency in my mind, and in conversations with others. In particular I find myself referencing the ‘self-help’ flow-chart diagrams we evolved as reminders of what it means to work with history. There is one that I made in a small group session that I refer to frequently. I often think about Sayed Sattar Hasan’s presentation on his ‘Grandfather’s Car’ project, because of the way he led the discussion about it in a pub, giving it a conversational aspect that was really effective. The way that the group came together, then split up to do individual things, then fluidly came together again offered me a model of working that I’ve tried out myself since: spreading some ‘seeds’ (thoughts, moments, feelings) and letting them lie for a while to see if they will germinate or not. Letting people self-lead, in the sense of developing their own needs and directions within the wider group: I think that proved a good working method and it’s something I want to continue.

NJ: This was quite a large residency group. How did people approach working alongside each other?

SK: Everybody had really different processes and different capacities at different times. Some people needed more ‘private space’ than others, some people developed one-to-one conversations alongside the group discussions, and some people were involved in developing work external to the residency as well as engaging with it, so the dynamics were complex, but it was great to see that diversity working as a collective and I felt it flowed really well. Everything fed in to the public programme we created, and the residency also coincided with Oslo World Festival, which complemented what we were doing.

The group’s affirmation of my work meant a lot. So did seeing the parallels between other residents’ working processes and mine: different outcomes at different moments. You see that you are not alone in dealing with the uncertainties of the creative process. At the start, it was left deliberately unclear whether we would develop a public outcome or not, but the concluding public sharing event came together really fluidly and strongly and showed how productive the whole experience had been.

NJ: Are there things from the residency that you will carry forwards?

SK: Yes. We're all interested in pursuing the idea of Carrying Histories part II, which was a recommendation from the group and Charlotte [PRAKSIS superstar]. This would effectively be a ‘second round’ of the process under the umbrella of Untethered Magic, the residency I run at my home/studio. That’s an indicator of how beneficial the residency was. CH part II would give an opportunity to pick up where everybody left off, in a very different time and space, after a year of reflection away from all the things that were shared in Oslo.

At the end of the residency we made a zine together that I have made a lot of use of since, and a flowchart to share with other groups that I meet. I recently used it within a workshop for a group of anthropology PhD students, and its flexibility made it a useful framework. I’m in communication with other residents and the potential for future meetings is high. It would also be great to bring the Kaspale project back to Oslo. The residency was a really beneficial and fruitful experience, and I'm grateful for all the time and effort you put into our collaboration.