by Manuela Nebuloni with Postbox Ghana
The installation brings together images of water in different African contexts, revealing its ambivalent nature: a vital element connected to fishing, trade, and spirituality, but also marked by historical trauma.
The postcards on display construct a polyphonic and layered visual ensemble. The ocean, with fishermen returning to the shores of Accra at the beginning of the twentieth century, enters into dialogue with commercial images of swimming pools and hotels. Strange, banal, or unusual, these photographs form a fragmented archive that becomes an involuntary reportage: a visual narrative of moments of transition, social change, processes of touristification, and dynamics of class and gender.
Swimming pools are a recurring element, endlessly repeating themselves, remaining almost unchanged while the world moves around them. These holiday images depict landscapes and nations that have sometimes disappeared, where the tourist presence overshadows the local one, generating new forms of representation within a global consumer culture.
Recalling that reality also takes shape through the images that represent it, the installation’s seemingly playful dimension opens onto deeper questions: it challenges dominant narratives, suggesting that every image is simultaneously a document and a construction.
Manuela Nebuloni
With a practice that embraces both research and the active use of archives, Manuela Nebuloni structures her investigation of Ghana as a process of learning and inquiry. Since 2020, she has been working on the construction of a physical archive of postcards and ephemera from the sixties as a tool for critically reflecting on the present, with a particular interest in amateur artistic production as a space for experimentation. She is the founder and a member of Postbox Ghana, a project exploring collective memory through material culture.
