The word saman is an Akan word used to colloquially refer to the photographic negative, it can be translated as ghost in English. Founded in 2015 by artist and writer Adjoa Armah, saman archive began as a repository for photographic negatives collected from studio and itinerant photographers across Ghana. It is a journey as much as a container.
saman is an archive, research centre and publishing space. A place for slow work in honour of many lives and lifetimes. It is an archive that resists the hegemonic functions of its kind. An archive of indeterminate boundaries. We are for teaching and learning differently, for listening deeply and committing to honouring what is heard, for reconciling the irreconcilable.
Through photographic negatives and the field recordings, interviews, maps, photographs, videos and relations being continually made in the creation of this repository, saman is in a continual process of open responsiveness and questioning. We ask:
How do we support photographers without relying on making images, that should not necessarily be public, public?
What else can be shared in the place of the photograph?
What are the functions of unseen presences in research methods?
How did we come to be here?
Where do we go from here?
What are the latent potentials of things?
We are interested in institution building grounded in Akan temporalities and West African technologies of social and historical mediation. Our teaching and learning are through art as life as historiography. We want to know what design thinking, narrative, and spatial consciousness can do. One particularly foundational collecting route for saman, border to border along the Ghanaian coast, is the prompt for Armah’s practice-led DPhil research in Fine Art at Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, with a project provisionally titled; 'Atlantic Marginalia: towards black historiography with the temporal consciousness of sand'.
You are invited.