ROW 3

Conducted at Ngala village in Nkhotakota in 2023, Row 3 celebrates the dugout canoe as a life-object of the fishing communities of Lake Malawi. We adorned the dugout canoes with patches of vinyl, carrying images taken by Ozhopé earlier in other fishing communities of southern Lake Malawi. Our vinyl patches imitate the plastic, metal, and wooden patches by the fishers to mend the canoes. Our patches are an additional layer of aesthetic and political narratives on the surface of the canoe. They unite the different stories from the different fishing communities. Some of the sculptures in this iteration reveal the canoe as totem, carrying the stories of their owners, of the fishing communities, and of the broader Malawian society.  Other sculptures metaphorically give the dugout canoe its flowers. Yet others elevate it and transform it into an ancestral space-time shuttle.