Swap Family: My Family Portrait emerged from a Ghanaian-German exchange project in which family narratives moved between two cultural and geographic contexts. Stories were exchanged, re-enacted, and re-sung, creating a process in which one family could encounter another through memory, objects, performance, and interpretation. My contribution to the project developed around the question of what makes a family portrait when likeness alone is not enough.
In one group of works, I layered objects received during the exchange with portraits made during the production process. The objects interrupt and merge with the photographic body, allowing personal possessions and visual traces to become part of how a person is represented. The portrait therefore becomes more than an image of an individual; it becomes a meeting point for relationships, histories, objects, and the circumstances through which people come to know one another.
A second installation transferred photographic images onto upright paper tubes. The form draws on the African proverb that compares a family to a forest: from a distance the trees appear as one body, but when we move closer, each tree can be recognised in its individuality. The installation uses this idea to hold together collectivity and difference. Each person belongs to a larger structure, while still carrying a distinct history and presence.
Through the exchange, I became interested in family as something that can be translated without becoming identical. Objects, photographs, and stories cross borders, but they acquire new meanings as they enter another person’s experience. My Family Portrait therefore expands portraiture beyond resemblance and asks how material, memory, and exchange can hold the complicated intimacy of belonging to others.
