By Dr. Andrea Stultiens

The interdisciplinary methods used in the AFREXTRACT research project are enriched by a multi-modal, experimental, and collective mode of making, centred around the production and use of photographs. I lead this part of the research from my position as an independent artistic researcher and senior lecturer at the MA Photography & Society at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.^[1] My role primarily consists of working with photographic imagery produced by photographers based in Zambia, South Africa, and Nigeria who were commissioned to document conditions of mining and extraction in their respective countries.

In May 2025, I joined researchers Iva Pesa, Jabulani Shaba, Anthony Chukwudumebi Obute, and Suzyika Chizenge Nyimbili in the Copperbelt. This proved to be a valuable opportunity to experience the potential of our respective approaches not within the context of an educational institute in the Netherlands, but in ‘the field’.

Two workshops were organised to reflect on and contextualise outcomes of their fieldwork research in Zambia so far. The first workshop took place at the Copperbelt University in Kitwe, the second one in a community space in Mufulira. Additionally, we took part in the first Bakashimika International Photography Festival in Lusaka and this visit made it possible to prepare for this ‘on the ground’.

Notes on the entanglement of photographs with mining and extraction
Before I describe the artistic making that unfolded during my stay in Zambia, I want to acknowledge that photography is a visual medium that has an intricate and problematic relation with resource extraction. In the English language, this relationship is reflected in the use of the verb to take when signifying the production of photographs, and it of course includes the extraction of silver needed for film based photographic processes, and rare earth metals used to power digital cameras.^[2] In addition, photographs have been instrumentalised by photographers from ‘the west’ to proverbially mine other realities, which resulted in problematically one-sided imaginations that perpetuate power imbalances.^[3]

Photographs, however, also afford presence and agency. The power of presence and agency through photographs was, in the mid-19th century, understood and used by Frederick Douglas and Sojourner Truth in the context of the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of black subjects in the United States.^[4] Classic documentary photography has taken note of extractive practices within and beyond colonial contexts. See, for instance, and in chronological order, these examples produced by American photographer Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) (gold mining, South Africa), Nigerian photographer George Osodi (oil extraction, Nigeria), and British photographer Jason Larkin.

Recently, collaborative and multi-vocal projects that use artistic methods have started to emerge.^[5] In such projects, there is room for imagination and speculation, which makes it possible to show and tell without classifying and fixing. Instead, such projects contribute to critical dialogues across disciplines. They often question conventional affordances of photographs, such as registration and documentation.

In Zambia, such methods resulted in several artistic outputs and a potential collaboration. In what follows, I describe the route towards these artistic outputs and how they led to the future collaboration.

Preparation: Photographic paintings and collages - with Danny Chiyesu

In 2024, Zambian photographer Danny Chiyesu joined members of the AFREXTRACT team during their fieldwork in the Copperbelt. He produced photographs of the Black Mountain in Mufulira and its surroundings, and portraits of several of the people who were interviewed. These photographs were edited in two ways. Firstly, Danny Chiyesu used photoshop to ‘paintify’ the photographic surface. Such surfaces tend to have an abundance of detail, which arguably keeps it all too connected to what is so familiar. Through the use of photoshop filters, the colours of the photographs were intensified and the abundance of detail reduced. In addition, Danny Chiyesu sometimes combines exposures in such a way that the scenes that were photographed are idealised.
The outcome of these edits is still photographic in the sense that the depiction is obviously a split moment, derived from a slice of time. But the abstracted surface suggests that this is a type of picture that is closer to art, rather than a registration of the mundane.

I used another strategy to intervene in the conventional photographic capture. While Danny’s paintified pictures enhance the singularity of the photographic frame, I aim to question it by superimposing pictures on top of one another and, where appropriate, expanding views. I literally open up the photographic frame, connect several frames to one another, and add drop shadows to emphasise rather than hide my actions. This results in pictures with irregular shapes that emerge from the overlaying.

I knew that the pictures Danny produced, and my edits of them, would be installed during two workshops directly related to the work of the AFREXTRACT team, and that they would be part of the inaugural Bakashimika international photofestival in Lusaka. Six of the paintified pictures were printed on an off-white paper made from grass, which gave them a lovely tone and structure. A larger selection of the edits I made were printed in a smaller size on ordinary white paper.

A Miner

On the day of my arrival in the Copperbelt, the AFREXTRACT team conducted an interview with David Chitumbo, who they had been introduced to as an artist and activist relevant to the research. After the interview, an artwork was acquired. The piece was expected to be too big for the available bag of the team members, which raised the question whether I might be able to transport it to Europe. Without seeing it, I was quite sure I could, thanks to the suitcase that transported the prints of Danny Chiyesu’s ‘paintified’ photographs.

Iseni ku migodi: senta yafuma - Performance film with Suzyika Chizenge Wa Bise Nyimbili

The following day the first of the two planned workshops took place at the Copperbelt University in Kitwe (22 May 2025). I installed one of the sets of prints just outside the seminar room in which presentations would take place. Throughout the day these pictures attracted and incited conversations among the workshop participants.

The day ended with a performance by Suzyika Chizenge Wa Bise Nyimbili. I was asked to film it for documentation purposes. Apart from my phone, I only brought a small point and shoot camera with me on this journey. I positioned myself on the first bench of the seminar room, but felt ill prepared, especially because I had no idea what the performance would be like. It consisted of several monologues derived from fieldwork interviews. The freedom afforded by an artistic approach to create what American novelist Tim O’Brien calls a ‘Good Form’ worked its miracles.^[6] After a day of academic talks and discussions, Suzyika Nyimbili’s delivery of the texts he had written re-energised the room. Several of the workshop participants remarked how powerful Suzyika’s contribution to the day had been.

This experience allowed me to better prepare for another round of documentation for the second performance during the workshop day in Mufulira two days later (24 May 2025). Here, the audience  included the people whose stories led to the script of the performance. I brought small lights that added Suzyika’s shadow as a character to the play and Jabulani Shaba and Anthony Chuwudumebi Obute joined me as cameramen using their phones. This audience enjoyed the ‘Good Form’ in another way. There was obvious recognition and identification ‘from the inside’ that added value to this version.

With the help of Lusaka based filmmaker, Albert Josiah, the three camera viewpoints were turned into a film.

A Miner II

The object that the team acquired from David Chitumbo turned out to be a relief made of an aluminium printing plate. It has two layers of visual information, the relief itself, which depicts a miner on his way with a spade  in a hilly landscape, and the remnants of the information that was reproduced with this print plate. I have been following Ugandan artist Odur Ronald, who builds an impressive oeuvre of sculptures, paintings, and installations literally with this material. This allows him to tell intimate stories while criticising the systems they are shaped by.
When closely examining the plate, I read on these remnants an article on private investments in the mining sector, and another one on the postponement of ‘Keep Zambia Clean, Green and Healthy activities to pave way for Africa Freedom Day celebrations’ which were supposed to take place on the same day. Both seemed, with the little I had come to know by then in terms of the lack of care that followed the privatisation of the mines and the sometimes conflicting attention given to cultural and environmental issues, to be relevant in relation to the miner that was added to the plate.
I photographed the plate under the strong Zambian morning sun, turned it around so that the sun hit the relief from the other side, flipped it so that the back faced up, and repeated the procedure. With the resulting pictures, I made a little animation. The sun, and the so-called male and female sides of the relief add a(nother) temporal dimension to the miner. I posted the animation to the Afrextract instagram account as well as my own.

Mufulira - a place of labour and abundance - Zine with several historical visual and textual sources

The small point and shoot camera I brought with me was perhaps not the best for filming a performance. It was perfect, though, for the production of decent quality observational photographs and served well to reproduce the historical materials that are part of Mr. Laurent Bwalya’s personal collection. These photographs, historical documents, and the poetry on mines, miners, and mining collected by the AFREXTRACT team intersected in such a way that it triggered the production of a DIY zine.

This zine was shown at the Bakashimika International Photography Festival alongside the prints of Danny Chiyesu’s pictures, the film of the performance by Suzyika Nyimbili, and Mr. Laurent Bwalya’s table cloth based on the coat of arms encountered in a 1980s Mufulira Directory published by the local Rotary Club.

The motto of this coat of arms is ‘Through Labour To Abundance’. When entering Mufulira through the main road, one finds the sign ‘Welcome to Mufulira, A Place of Abundance’. The motto on the coat of arms at least acknowledges the substantial human effort made to mine this abundance.

A Miner III

On the day I would be leaving Zambia, artist Stary Mwaba welcomed me to his studio. Stary and I met over a decade ago in Ghana. While we have been following each other on social media since, this was the first time we met in person again. Also, Stary’s name kept popping up in conversations during the ten days I spent in Zambia because of the work he does on the Black Mountain in Kitwe. I was of course eager to hear more about that.

One of the first remarks Stary made after warmly receiving me was that the work in the animation I had posted on Instagram was actually the result of his initiative and as such part of his work. After telling him how I got to photograph it, he enlightened me on how to read it.
In a long term and ongoing effort to understand the effects of the mines and the Black Mountain on the people and environment of the Copperbelt, where Stary was born and grew up, he set up a studio in Kitwe. He collaborates with young people who used to work in the mines, and other members of the community. One of the initiatives he took was to investigate the practice of embossing copper plates. When Stary was young himself, embossed copper plates were part of many households as decorative or votive image objects. Because the price of copper plates increased, they were less and less available, and with them the craft of embossing dwindled.
David Chitumbo is one of the people who Stary collaborates with. He has a personal museum, which used to be much bigger than it currently is. Stary exhibited the outcomes of his studio there. Among these exhibits were embossed aluminium plates, based on drawings commissioned by Stary. The plates were made by an elder who used to professionally emboss copper plates. Efforts are also made to pass on the skill to the younger generation.

The plate should not have been sold to the AFREXTRACT team. But now that it is, it also entangles the AFREXTRACT research project and Stary’s work. I hope that this is a start of something that will be of interest to all involved.
Being in Zambia with members of the AFREXTRACT team not only introduced me to realities on the ground in the Copperbelt. It was also helpful in starting to understand how different team members, the people we engage with, and our respective experiences and expertise lead to different ways of engaging with these realities.

[1] When my involvement in the project started, I was also employed in Groningen at Minerva Art Academy / Hanze University of Applied Science. For more about my methodological use of collective making, see Andrea Stultiens, 2018, Ebifananyi, a study of photographs in Uganda in and through an artistic practice (Dissertation, PhDarts, Leiden University).

[2] Siobhan Angus, 2024, Camera Geologica, An Elemental History of Photography, Duke University Press.

[3] E.g. Edward Said, 1978, Orientalism; John Tagg, 1988, The Burden of Representation.

[4] Martha J. Cutter, 2020, ‘The Fugitive Gazes Back: The Photographic Performance Work of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth’, in In Media, The French Journal of Media Studies, 8.2 I 2020, Center for Research on the English-Speaking World.

[5] E.g. Sabine Luning (NL) & Nii Obodai (GH), Gold Matters; Marina Sulima (SI/NL) & Olivia D’Cruz IN/NL), In the Courtroom with Rocks; Lisa Barnard, The Canary and the Hammer.

[6] Timothy O’Brien, The Things They Carried, 1990.