The Ancestral Travels of Gladys Kalichini and Maritea Dæhlin

In November 2024, via Google Meet, Gladys Kalichini and I recreated the space from her series … these practices are done in sharing her stories (2020 – 2022) where she explores ways in which memory can be shared and transmitted through cleansing rituals. Here, water participates as a living entity capable of being a storage facility and a mirror to the human body as an archive itself. The space features a washing station with basins, soap, and towels, creating a calming environment where participants share stories while Kalichini washes their hands and feet, a gesture of care and attentive listening.

Later we spoke about the work that Kalichini created with her grandmother in Kamwala in Lusaka in 2022 … still, these practices are done in sharing her stories (2022) which continues from the 2020 four channel video … these practices are done in sharing her stories. The work explores memory retention after death, using water to reflect the life cycles of the body. In this interactive performance, Kalichini’s grandmother, dressed in traditional wax print and white clothing reminiscent of historical periods tied to the narratives of these women, becomes a central motif. Her presence and stories are expressed through the ritual of washing, bridging personal memory with collective history. Gladys Kalichini’s work often revolves around preservation, constantly reconsidering how memory is preserved and stored.

Our exchange suggested that water may respond in ways that are not always aligned with human expectations, and that in order to communicate with it one must see differently. Kalichini’s involvement with archives in search of erased women narratives from Zambian history has taken a similar approach. She shared that at first, the archive was “complicated space in terms that stories of women never made it there, and when they did, they went to become invisible”.

Interested in knowing more about how these female figures have shaped her identity, we talked about a woman called Julia Chikamoneka whose name translates in Bemba to “it will become seen”. Kalichini writes in her doctoral dissertation about navigating archival spaces to bring figures like Julia Chikamoneka out of the archives and back into collective memory. This process comes alive in her multimedia installations, combining archival photographs and materials from independence struggles. Using video, fabric, paper, and paint, Kalichini creates spaces that honor female freedom fighters and the complexities of memory. By embedding Chikamoneka’s image within these dynamic, tactile environments, Kalichini not only commemorates her legacy but reanimates her presence, ensuring her story resonates beyond the confines of the archive into a shared historical consciousness.. She notes, “she was helping me form vision, in order to see her, I must imagine her here”.

Maritea Dæhlin’s practice also finds itself in this fluid form where the body, language and thoughts travel from one place to the other. They shapeshift to challenge what is traditional. Ancestry and spirituality serve as sources of inspiration and a framework for understanding her Norwegian-Cameroonian identity and artistic expression. She often reflects on her immediate family – her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. This connection helps her ground the abstract idea of ancestors into tangible relationships, allowing her to draw from their artistic legacies. In the performance and video work I WANT TO BE TRADITIONAL (2020), she incorporates tactile materials applied to her skin, such as covering it with clay —a gesture that evokes the influence of her grandmother, a Danish ceramist, and the symbolic significance of clay in combination with her physicality, or in Originally a Plant (2022) where she paints her face in red, as an intuitive connection with her Cameroonian great grandmother. She also uses other natural materials like salt in her video Represent, to explore themes of preservation and pain, reflecting its duality as both a protective agent and a source of discomfort. These elements interact seamlessly with her performance spaces, grounding her abstract explorations in tangible, sensory experiences that connect with her roots without necessarily reproducing specific cultural practices.

In a conversation online about her work during the residency, language was highlighted, in the context of how some people are always expected to understand and others dominate the narrative and “the understanding”. The continual shift between language becomes a central element in Daehlin’s work, allowing the transition to a state in between worlds, a space left open to interpretation, between sleep and being awake, casting the unseen and the ability to sit with what is.

Maritea Daehlin’s role in her work regarding sleep involves facilitating a space to relax, to foster trust, and creating an environment where participants can explore their vulnerabilities through the act of going in and out of sleep together while listening to a sound work that includes a resistance to the subject of rest and sleep. This includes using elements like lavender tea to promote relaxation and setting up spaces that encourage a deep sense of comfort. In Sleep Locks the Bones (2024), warm purple and magenta tones create an intimate atmosphere, with beds arranged around soft light (created in collaboration with the scenographer Corentin Leven and more), inviting participants to relax into a dream-like state.

She also mentions the importance of trust in her work, particularly the aspiration to reach a point where she can “sleep in my own work”, indicating a complete trust in the experiences she creates. This reflects a desire for her artistic practice to be a space of safety and kindness, both for herself and for those who participate in her work.

Despite having run different paths, through their work, Maritea Daehlin and Gladys Kalichini prove that connection happens way beyond material means. Via online residencies and by engaging with their African ancestry, both artists foster a need to understand the deeper connections between the invisible and our physical existence.

Gladys Kalichini is a contemporary visual artist and researcher from Lusaka, Zambia. Her work centers around notions of erasure, memory and representations and visibilities of women in colonial resistance histories.

Maritea Daehlin is an artist who lives and works in Norway and Mexico, second generation Cameroonian. Her work, spanning between video, performance, sound and text, is shaped by shifting geographies and contexts, being multilingual, non-linear and sometimes absurd.

Sheila Ramirez is a Cuban-Angolan designer and researcher exploring ancestral cosmologies through archives and musicalities from Africa and the Caribbean.

This text is an editorial collaboration between OCA and C&AL.

OCA initiated this home-based residency in collaboration with the artist-initiated non-profit library and research centre Livingstone Office for Contemporary Art (LoCA) in Zambia and the artist community Casa Ma in Costa Rica. Their book Voicing Out Silences was co-published this year by ASSATA Press.