Woman Go No’Gree is the work of the photographer Gloria Oyarzábal on how colonization affected the concept of woman, to later show the position of African women today through her own experience in various environments: both her daily life and some events and places such as concerts, popular festivals, Ifá divination rituals, ceremonies, discotheques.

The sentence that gives it its name —taken from a song by the singer and activist Fela Kuti— is in Pidgin, a mixture of English and Creole, and refers to the woman who disagrees. Each piece of that essay that won the Paris Photo-Aperture 2020 for the best photobook of the year contains more questions and surprises than certainties, rounds and rounds of meaning about the construction of social imaginaries, the wealth of situated knowledge and black feminisms, the position of the gaze, the consequences of European colonization, the narrative of privileges.

Gloria Oyarzábal was born marked by the rose of the winds, she immediately had two nationalities: the American by her mother, the Spanish by her father. She was born in London, where Mr. Oyarzábal was a diplomat. As a girl she lived in Ecuador, Japan, and the United States. Her first camera came as a first communion gift. She studied Fine Arts, devoted herself to restoration. She was a student of the Master of the Blank Paper collective, where she studied photography. A shoot in which her filmmaker partner was working changed her course again to Africa.

You lived on almost every continent and stayed in Africa. Why?

My partner is a filmmaker and he came up with a project to make a documentary in Mali and we were shooting sporadically for a year, it was crazy. Finally we decided to settle there and develop the project collaborating with the locals in post production. We had previously traveled to Burkina and different countries in the area and we chose Mali. Finally we rolled the blanket over our heads and settled in Bamako with children and a dog.

There I assumed a certain responsibility in terms of my gaze and positioning. I spent a first season reading, I discovered terms like “Négritude” and I delved into how the idea of ​​Africa is created, from the imaginary. I couldn’t fall for that stereotype of the pretty women dressed in the pretty fabrics and the children smiling.

At what point did you understand that you had responsibility over that gaze?

It was an intense emotional process. I did fine arts. I spent many years working as a restorer, I taught shape analysis and photography accompanied me as a pleasure and a tool for my profession.

I started reading essays written by Africans and a process that has no turning back began. I found a whole continent generating a speech. Until then, my references were the “best sellers” —the best known— and what was written in Europe… There are poetry, novels and essays that were written fifty years ago and more. I understood that I had to investigate colonization not only as a violent, geopolitical, border act. I also discovered what the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiongo calls “decolonizing the mind.”

Through the colonization of the mind language is modified; there are the concepts of modernity, of well-being, canons of beauty. And there is also the concept of woman, which changed a lot with colonization, with Victorian education above all.

When we talk about decolonial feminism in Latin America we think of Rita Segato, for example. How did you come to these ideas of the construction of the social mandate of women?

I could say that I am a late feminist because I did not put the purple glasses on until the day before yesterday, as they say. When I arrived in Mali more than 10 years ago, at first I did not understand well: I saw Malian women living in an apparent matriarchy, and yet I still found elements that seemed out of tune to what in my opinion should be the emancipation of women. I was confused and frustrated.

I wonder: “How is it that these women, so powerful, have not looked at the journey of societies like mine. White western women have achieved so many things and have struggled so much: why didn’t they take us as a reference?!” There I put my hands to my head and thought: “How horrible! How can I have so much pride and be so unaware of my privilege”. That was the germ.

One of the books that inspired and accompanied me was the reading of The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses by the Nigerian writer Oyèronké Oyěwùmí. That book confirmed to me that before colonization there were no privileges in these societies due to gender issues, but rather age or lineage governed. I was interested in delving into this by focusing on the Yoruba. Although most of the Yoruba live in southwestern Nigeria they are also found in the republics of Benin and Togo, as well as a Yoruba diaspora in Sierra Leone, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Cuba, Puerto Rico, North Carolina, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad, Mexico, Venezuela, Panama, and Honduras. It is a great community with a great particular religious ancestral tradition.

Another primordial reading was Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society by the also Nigerian writer Ifi Amadiume. The book is about how a woman can marry a widow to accompany her and take care of her, and society did not reject her.

I read things that seemed very topical to me. In my book I quote Hegel, who in his book Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837) talks about how Africa is one step below the evolution of history. This is an example of the construction of a humiliating imaginary that has been perpetrated for centuries to the present day with the clear example of the reinforcement of that imaginary by media.

I got into that fascinating world of feminisms. There are many variants, many philosophies, many ways of living feminism: those who work with the body, with nature, with the inclusiveness of man… They have been in existence for a long time and have had no contact with the process of Western feminisms.

You also worked alongside African artists.

In 2017 I did a residency that included exchanges between artists. I spent two months working in Madrid with two Nigerian artists, two South African, and then four Spanish artists traveled: two to Nigeria and two to South Africa. I went to Lagos, a brutal, mammoth city, it is a megalopolis, vast, the largest city in Africa! There I was able to develop in depth my research on these women, my awareness of these discourses, which came with a basis of the exhibition that I did at the end of my period of the Ranchito artist residency in Matadero (Madrid) where in a multimedia staging you found projections, sculpture, photo and a reading point

Previously I lived in Bamako (Mali) for 3 years. When I returned to Spain I began to do my more personal projects. I got into Blank Paper and found a language that has always moved me, and from there I continued talking about the processes that created the African imaginary, its stereotypes, decolonization processes and neo-colonizing strategies today, especially through the colonization of the mind with the canons of beauty, the concepts of modernity, of well-being (wellness), of romantic love. It is very exciting, it nourishes my perspective of the planet, not only of Africa’s relationship with Europe, but of what it is the oppressor and the oppressed.

Discovering this lowered my speech. When I was writing the text of the book, the Black Lives Matter movement broke out and we were in a pandemic, all confined. Suddenly I had a brutal cascade of information. After that I must admit that I began to admire writers a lot, because there is nothing more difficult than to write and organize your ideas. All the information about white privilege fell, on how the concept of whiteness as a privilege has been built.

How did it impact you personally?

The privilege of white people is very evident. In Africa they allow you certain things that can be even outrageous: give you the best place on a trip, not question you. They tell you: “We are stronger but you are smarter.” We created an imaginary and they believed it. That mirror is so frustratingly twisted .

In my book I talk about this responsibility. I quote Peggy McIntosh who wrote White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack in 1988. In 50 bullets it helps you identify your privileges

There is a Miguel Rio Branco’s exhibition that begins with an installation art: the windshield wiper of a completely broken car. Rio Blanco, Magnum’s Brazilian photographer, was the son of diplomats. He explained that the broken glass represented his life as a truncated journey because every time he settled in one place as a child he had to go to another, and he took it very badly. Being the daughter of an ambassador, how has it marked your production and your questions?

I respect the experiences of other people. For me it has been rewarding. I went through eleven schools, it was a constant upset that lasted a couple of days: for example, my childhood in Ecuador has been the most beautiful thing in my life. In San Sebastián, my father was civil governor in the hardest years of ETA. I had a fairly happy childhood, I returned to Madrid and settled down, I had children and I moved again when I went to Mali and France. When you are aware of the enormity of the planet you become more humble. You know that there is not only your speech, your world and your little bubble.

In my classes I ask the students: “When you go to another community, do you researc music, speeches, history, local production? It is a way to decentralize and decolonize your own gaze a little. Then the next step is to react. How do you react? Well, from the closest to you, to your environment. What happens around the corner from your house? Is there another community? So to take an active part, help and make other communities visible in my case from the artistic field.

When I went to Mali my son was 12 years old, he cried: “Why do I have to go?” I told him: “Well, we are going to get out of our bubble, there are other landscapes.” “I’m very well in my bubble,” he replied (laughs). I have no reproach to my parents, only gratitude. My education was not special because I was the daughter of an ambassador, I did not have everything in my favor. I got nothing for that, if I had become a lawyer … maybe.

Look, I think the first time I was aware of my privilege was in Ecuador, because I went with my mother to these things to visit the schools of Spanish nuns and I realized, when I was ten years old, that I was surrounded by middle-class children, for me super exotic, with those features and those skin colors and all of them super loving. And my mother gave me a little money and I invited them all to an ice cream in a stall outside the school. I was horribly embarrassed to be aware of having all those faces at my mercy.

Can you tell us about the book?

Woman Go No’Gree was possible because in 2019 I won the Images Vevey Photobook Award festival in Switzerland. Well, one Sunday morning nothing more and nothing less than the wonderful Indian photographer Dayanita Singh called me as president of the jury, to tell me that I had won. In the presentation video I can be heard screaming on the other end of the phone. But the nice thing is that it explains my project not as a solution essay but as a question trigger.

I ended it in the pandemic. I was supposed to present it in September in Vevey (Switzerland) during the festival, but due to sanitary restrictions because of the pandemic, I unfortunately couldn’t go. But the festival did take place, apparently it was very interesting, with great photographers, almost everything in the open air. They made an installation of my photos in an antique covered market by printing my photos on huge canvases.

I would like to make it clear that in this project I addressed the issue of how colonization affected the concept of women, so my speech mainly addresses the colonizers… although not only them. Any reader is welcome. I haven’t had the chance to show it on the mainland yet. One of the several exhibitions canceled due to the pandemic was Addis Foto (Ethiopia) where it would have been very interesting to have feedback. Hopefully it can take place soon.

The cover art is shocking.

I know Alberto Salván Zulueta (Tres Tipos Gráficos), the designer of the photobook, for many years, it is easy to work with someone who understands you.

The project has three layers: the archive photos, which I got in the National Museum of Lagos (Nigeria), in flea markets that I have been collecting for years, and in a Nigerian magazine called Nigeria published from the late 19th to the 1980s. As a second formal layer are the photos that I was able to take during my residency in Lagos, attending various events and getting into many environments: parties, ceremonies, rituals, daily encounters… And the third layer of the project are studio photos. I wanted to take advantage of the fact that I was the second largest film producer country in the world: there is Bollywood (Bombay, India) and there is Nollywood, which is Nigeria, and third is Hollywood.

I had a hard time finding a traditional studio because they have very modern studios.

I chose a model and for hours, in a frantic way, I dedicated myself to recreating these stereotypes of African women, that hypersexualized, exoticized, victimized or primitivized woman. I also took pictures of her in normal clothes, but to my surprise at that moment when I gave her the copies she didn’t like them. It also happened to me with African friends who come from a more traditional background.

I realized that they want to be very made up, to look like actresses. And at the same time, these are the photos that create the most skepticism when reading by European or Westernized African descendants. I am hyperbolizing the stereotypes created in the western imaginary and this is a complex reading.

In the text of my book, among others, I quote Chimamanda Adichie. She wrote We Should All Be Feminists, which was a boom. I contacted her to see if she could write me a text. She has an office in London, another in New York, they told me: “No, miss, Chimamanda is busy until 2036” (laughs).

For me, her idea of ​​her Tedtalk The Danger of a Single Story was paramount: “Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” I wanted to talk about this with those studio photos. As if in Spain I made a portrait of a flamenco woman full of combs and with the figure of a bull on her head. I put myself on that plan, but not everyone read it like that.

How was the experience of taking photos in the street? Did you come across the typical image of the photographer who goes to Africa and has a fixer to get into dangerous places?

I arrived with my homework done because I already had the gymnastics from when I lived in Mali. I have been lucky enough to travel to many African countries, but in almost all of them the relationship with photography is the same. You always have to ask permission, but you have to ask permission to take a photo of a tree, because that is their tree.

It is one thing that must be respected. At first I was outraged. But hey, it’s as if you go to Germany and you don’t like sausages, problem for you. It is true that I have some photos from the back, but I always approach them and then show it to them. If they don’t like them, I delete them or don’t use it. I’m not much into street photography either. I’m not a studio photographer, or a street photographer. I don’t really know what photographer I am (laughs).

When you approach photography, what does it offer you specifically?

My approach to photography was at first as a tool for my profession as a restorer, but the creative side has always accompanied me. First I had the typical camera of the first communion, then I was lucky to have a very very good analog camera that I used until recently, because I am not a fetishist, I do not go crazy with the technical part.

I started with a Nikon FM2 and now I use a D700. I also sometimes use a 6×7 medium format Mamiya RB67… and I am a huge fan of Polaroids.

In Fine Arts I learned a very technical and boring type of photography that didn’t motivate me at all. Photography for me is an excuse. My next project is going to be anecdotally photographic. My next project has to do with the restitution of looted property, focusing on Nigeria; I will also again address the representation of African women and the relationship with white women. It is a more multimedia approach that will consist of two videos facing each other, photography, sculpture…

Right at the beginning of the pandemic I had already obtained permission to shoot in Paris, Brussels, London. But it could not be for the moment, I will have to reinvent myself. In a couple of weeks I start production.