Luca Spano on the Ozhopé collective.
Walking along a shore and looking at objects carried onto the sand by the sea current. Seeing these objects slowly piling up, one on top of the other, constructing something day after day. Organic matter mixes with residues of artificially produced goods. Colors vanish. Distinctions between the natural and the man-made disappear. Geological time blends with the capitalist one. The pace of local waves interacts with the rhythm of global systems of consumption, forming new conglomerates or new “things” that respond to the collapsing of time and space. This process opens up interstitial dimensions through which to view the world from delocalized angles.
Approaching the work of the Ozhopé collective requires awareness of invisible structures that operate in the “here and now” as much as in the “before and after.” These structures exist in a constant state of potential visibility, deeply nested in the tense weaving of the global socio-economic fabric. Ozhopé has developed a methodology centered on physical presence to identify and confront these structures, exploring how they strip agency from those who inhabit this fabric. To do so, they immerse themselves in specific contexts and adopt a situationist practice. Even as mere observers, the presence of Ozhopé’s members is enough to unravel social textures, cultural frictions, and economic asymmetries.
The words "looking" and "seeing" intentionally initiate this inquiry into their work. These words imply eyes, epidermic interfaces, collective senses, and the anthropological concept of “observant observation.” Observe yourself in the process of observing. Identify yourself as part of the context to picture the whole. In this situation, they search for interpretative forms of understanding that are not a priori or posthumous, but rooted in the witnessing of epiphanies, where complex interactions become exposed under the sunlight.
To understand Ozhopé, one must look at the soil from which they grew. Founded in 2017 in Malawi, the collective emerged from a desire to feel and learn how to see, rather than to control, the variables that make hidden relationships materialize. In that sense, Ozhopé describes itself as a group of "thinkivists" who treat the Malawian landscape as a living laboratory. The group is composed of a diverse array of Malawian intellectuals and artists, including visual artist Massa Lemu, writer Emmanuel Ngwira, photo-videographer Tavwana Chirwa, and artists Ella Banda and Paul Chimbwanya.
Their collaboration is defined by a "biopolitical collectivism," a practice that centers the human subject within the larger landscape of capitalism and ecology. In this light, listing the members and their hypothetical roles feels reductive. Ozhopé functions like a porous organism; the group allows members to move in and out of the membrane that holds them together. It adapts, both in terms of the practitioners who shape the art practice and the process of letting the context, the people, and the events around them become active variables in a self-unfolding response to creation.
The name Ozhopé itself carries the weight of a communal philosophy, deriving from the Yao word wosopé, which translates to "all of them." The story of the name tells of a young boy who, upon seeing the artists working together on the shores of Lake Malawi, used the word to describe the blurring of individual identities into a single, collective force. Being, waiting, looking, and listening become tools to perceive the "unseeable net" that intertwines Lake Malawi with global society. This ethos problematizes the concept of authorship in favor of the role of a facilitator: an entity that activates hidden mechanics to outline them through multiple means.
A concise definition of the collective’s approach is found through the perspective of a “time and space conversational methodology.” This multidimensional dialogue reveals the global interplay occurring in the fishing villages of Mangochi and Senga Bay, which often serve as the production and exhibition theaters for the collective’s interventions. By establishing a practice rooted in rural coastal areas, Ozhopé collapses the distance between theoretical inquiries, personal experiences, and shared feelings related to the impact of imperialist policies on micro and macro scales. Their practice feels like an act of “experiencing the letting happen,” developed to create forms of "re-existence" for the things and people around them. This process allows a temporarily expanded community to organically reclaim a collective agency over objects and situations in the face of an imposed external order of meaning.
One recurring presence at the core of their research is the dugout canoe, or bwato. This vessel is an enduring symbol of Malawian life, an organic technology carved from massive tree trunks, representing a lineage of knowledge and labor that stretches back centuries. Yet, in the hands of Ozhopé, the bwato stands as a scarred, mutated object. For them, the canoe appears to encompass its role as a tool for fishing while becoming more like a text capable of assembling past, present, and speculative futures. The vessel serves as a narrative stratificational object to study contemporary processes of "sedimentation." This effect stems from the repair process adopted by the village fishermen. When the canoe gets damaged or starts rotting due to age, its body is repaired using found materials collected from the waters of Lake Malawi.
The canoe becomes a canvas on which materials like USAID vegetable oil tins are nailed to seal holes and cracks in the hull. Metal cut-outs mix with plastic, wood, and paint, creating a Gestaltian text where overlapping textures allow transnational languages to emerge. Paraphrasing Ozhopé, these repairs are traces of a "racial capitalocene," where the remnants of international aid and industrial waste are grafted onto ancient technology. Patching the canoe preserves its functionality while expanding its aesthetic possibilities.
This friction between organic wood and the industrial patches recalls the fragmented experience of reality for a large portion of the world's population. In her work The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, media theorist Anne Friedberg explores how seeing the world has shifted from the single-frame perspective of the Renaissance to the fragmented, multi-layered experience of the digital age. Alberti’s window was a metaphor for a clear, unified view of reality, a stable perspective that placed the observer in a position of mastery. However, Friedberg argues that the modern computer screen, with its overlapping windows and multiple simultaneous streams of information, has shattered this unity. We now live in a world of "windows over windows," a state of constant fragmentation where different temporalities and locations compete and delocalize our positions.
The dugout canoe appears as a physical manifestation of this digital window experience, inserted into the rural landscape of Lake Malawi. The patches on the hull do not blend into the wood; they sit on top of it, creating a "glitched" surface that mirrors the aesthetic of a computer desktop. Each USAID tin patch is a pop-up window that shows the capitalist history of international aid, juxtaposed with the wood as the ancestral connection to the use of the lake as a source of sustenance. The canoe is no longer a solid, analog object; it is a montage resulting from a bricolage practice, as conceptualized by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. In his seminal text The Savage Mind (in the sense of untamed human thought), the anthropologist describes the bricoleur as a figure who works with "whatever is at hand." The bricoleur’s tools and materials are never perfectly suited to the task; they are the leftovers of previous activities, a closed set of remnants that carry their own histories.
The word “remnants” is very important. These canoes display residual images from both outside and inside Malawi’s borders. They are assemblages of “poor images,” objects characterized by a low-res appearance due to digital information loss, to quote Hito Steyerl. Just as a “poor image” is a low-quality digital file that has been compressed, copied, and circulated until it loses its original resolution, these patches are the physical files of global trade. They have been battered by the lake and the sun, losing their original commercial luster but gaining a new, subversive power through their very degradation. Plastic, metal, and rubber are discarded in the lake, where they mutate and develop a worn-out aesthetic that carries a story transported in the form of canoe patches.
A deconstructed visuality emerges, generating new narratives and economic values. Just as we navigate digital screens through fragmented interfaces, the fisherman navigates the lake through a fragmented, glitched vessel. The so-called clear view promised by the Renaissance window is revealed to be an illusion. What remains are the multiple low-res windows of the bwato, where survival depends on the ability to see and navigate the conflicting structures of rural-capitalist reality.
The symbolic value of the canoe is artistically translated into different interactions developed by the collective between 2017 and 2023. The work ROW is a rich introduction to the collective's underlying dialogic and aesthetic mechanics. This piece is a single-channel video divided into five chapters. The journey begins with a silent canoe crossing the screen, where a male figure in a suit has his face replaced by the red "Simoni" mask of the Gule Wamkulu tradition. This mask has been historically connected to satirizing white men, although here it takes on a new role, embodying the mystical presence of a glocal corporate entity.
The silence is then shattered by the rhythm of a repetitive performance. Now the mask is gone, but the business suit remains on a character that stands waist-deep in the lake. This figure strikes the water with a paddle, generating a splashing noise. He accompanies this gesture by repeatedly shouting "eya" (yes) and "ayi" (no). It feels like watching a parody of a made-up struggle. It is the mise en abyme of a governance attitude, where authorities oscillate between constructed forms of consent and denial. The feeling is one of play, where there is no sincerity, but only the search for self-justification and public approval. Looking up for some fragments of Lake Malawi's history, it is inevitable to see this as a reflection of neocolonial oil deals in the area and the neglect of the environment's actual needs.
This absurdity curdles into a visionary image as the scene shifts to a dystopian future captured in a neorealist fashion. In the muddy waters of the lake, children appear wearing gas masks. The situation feels game-like, inserted in the scenario of a post-apocalyptic struggle. We watch these kids tussling over a single canoe in a world where the air has turned hostile. The boundary between playing and fighting becomes uncertain. We witness a contemplation of a future shaped by an apparently invisible environmental collapse, where the next generation is left to inherit the wreckage of a consumed world.
The gaze returns to the canoe, now stuck and immobilized. A man wears the Simoni mask again, but the business suit is gone. We see the skin of his torso. We see a canoe stranded. We see the plastic patches on its hull. We see a man paddling in the sand to the rhythm of the background music. Something has shifted. A certain mindset has been acquired, generating a loop of colonial dependency from which it is difficult to escape. The lake is no longer in sight; it feels far away, almost suggesting it has been taken or moved. We are on land with no possibility of going anywhere.
The work plays ambiguous chords even in the last fifth chapter, suggesting both resistance and surrender at the same time. A half-canoe is animated by an anonymous body. This piece of a vessel becomes an armature, a roof, or perhaps the other half of a new organic being with legs. We follow this hybrid entity, somewhere between a mythological hermit crab and a ritualistic costume, as it enters the waters of Lake Malawi until it disappears. Wood, plastic patches, and a body are swallowed by the current. The lake becomes the custodian of their symbolism, their time, and their space. The lake preserves and dissolves the past, present, and future; the objects, the practices, and the bodies. It suddenly moves from being the theater to being the protagonist of the political dynamics.
The last image of ROW is the lake and only the lake. Protagonist and theater merge, serving as both a witness and a mute narrator of a fragmented history. The lake hosts Ozhopé, and it also swallows it, dissolving expanded members' identity into a collective and ecological narrative that reclaims agency through the very acts of looking, listening, and waiting. Again, the tools to see the invisible structures.
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Bibliography
Lemu, M., & Ngwira, E. (2019). Row: a thinkivist art intervention. Nordia Geographical Publications, 47(5), 39-54. Anderson K. Ethics, Ecology, and the Future: Art and Design Face the Anthropocene Leonardo (2015) 48 (4): 338–347Friedberg A. The virtual window : from Alberti to Microsoft. MIT Press (2006)Steyerl H. In Defense of the Poor Image. e-flux journal #10 (2009) Lèvi-Strauss C. The Savage Mind. Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1994)—————————-
