Wata Na Life
This year, Noorderlicht is collaborating with PhMuseum, an Italian organisation with a renowned photography website and festival. As part of their biennial ‘Women Photographers Grant’, Noorderlicht offered to host an exhibition during its festival REGENERATE. The Noorderlicht curators reviewed all submissions and selected Ngadi Smart.
Wata Na Life (‘Water is life’) is a common term in Sierra Leone, where water is scarce and has monetary status. Smart explores how communities adapt to the dynamics between water and the increasingly volatile climate. The people that are among the first to experience the effects of climate change are often forced to come up with their own solutions, where corporate and government systems tend to be too rigid to be effective.
Smart’s work is an exuberant celebration of Sierra Leone and its people, ignoring the dehumanizing way Western media usually portrays Africa, the so-called ‘poverty porn’. Her collages bring together people and places, a technique that allows her to achieve a more authentic representation than what a single photograph would allow. The most important thing for Smart is that Sierra Leoneans look at her photos with a sense of pride.
’Wata Na Life’ has been made possible by Wateraid & The British Journal of Photography.
