This project started in 2012 when I re-visited Ghana after a five year hiatus. This was very much a personal project with no real conscious effort to produce a body of work prior to my arrival. In hindsight I see it as an attempt to discover more about myself and my ancestry. Being a second generation daughter of Ghanaian parents, my upbringing was fused together with both African and British customs, traditions and beliefs which I often found extremely difficult to maintain. There were tremendous clashes within the two cultures and growing up I felt quiet burdened trying to uphold these opposing versions of myself; my social life with my British friends and home life with what seemed like the quintessential African family. During my adolescence, I became increasingly withdrawn from my Ghanaian ties with the enforcement of strict and rigid codes of conduct constructing a future I had little interest in. Whereas with my British peers, a sense of liberation simultaneously emerged as I discovered the world of art and music that ushered in a freedom I had never experienced till then. A long streak of rebellion and defiance fuelled the latter years of my adolescence and refusal to make the yearly family trip to Ghana was all part of my personal campaign to rid myself of all things Ghanaian.
In 2009, I started my degree in Applied Psychology where coincidently one of my first lectures was concerning the importance of early attachments with primary care givers. I always knew I had an avoidant relationship with my parents but did not fully consider the enduring effects and possible damaging consequences. I started to realise my bitterness was not necessarily with my parents but rooted in my misconceptions about Ghana and the cultural systems I believed it promoted.
Thus the motivation behind the project was a quest to discover and challenge the rationality, order and motivations behind the stern, aspirational, spiritualized and prideful nation of Ghana. I decided to venture out to Accra, the birth place of my parents to rediscover my roots; to see if I could understand the people a little better, to see if I could understand myself any better.
