Yeah, I think I've got a really strong interest in, I suppose, non-Western ways of keeping history and recording history because that's what I've grown up with. So as a South Sudanese person, a Dinka person, we have a tradition of writing songs to tell stories. And beyond that, also a lot of our names are sort of ways to record history as well. My name Atong means like war, or it references war, because I was born during a time of war. And other people's names reference whatever kind of period that they were born in. So, there's this interesting thing where for me, culturally, history has always been embodied and has always been a participatory thing rather than, I don't know, something that happens after the fact. It's not about, say, if you get to write it, you get to sort of change it or whatever. It's more along the lines of just by existing, by having a name, by participating in a family, you are part of history, and your participation in that history will always be recorded.
So my interest is, like you know, how do I continue that history through my own photographic practice and arts practice. There's sort of for me an interest in figuring out how to combine the visual language of photography with the oral language of record-keeping in a Dinka tradition.
I think for me as someone who uses primarily digital photography, it can often feel like the photographic object is separate to the practice of making photographic works because they can just sort of exist in the digital realm. But there is also for me such an importance to the printed photograph and that as a sculpture in its own right.
I'm trying to think of ways to engage with that object outside of printing, framing, hanging. Because my relationship to photography or my relationship to photos, I should say, is photo albums. These objects that require participation and these objects that kind of have an emotional weight as well as a physical weight. And, you know, are designed to sort of exist as objects, and I find that really important and fascinating.
