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Mozambique: Yassmin Forte is one of five winners of the Contemporary African Photography Prize 2023
8:39 CAT | 28 Jul 2023
History Repeats Itself. From This is a story about my family, 2022 / ByYassmin Forte
Mozambican photographer Yassmin Forte is among the five winners of the CAP Prize, an international award for Contemporary African Photography 2023, with the work entitled ‘This is a story about my family”, with photographic collage.
The CAP prize is the international award for Contemporary African Photograpy and has been presented annually since 2012 to five photographers. This year’s winners are Nadia Ettwein, Yassmin Forte, Maheder Haileselassie, Carlos Idun-Tawiah and now two-time winner Léonard Pongo.
The prize is directed at photographers whose work engages with the African continent or its diaspora. It consists of a series of exhibitions produced in collaboration with significant photography festivals in Africa and the rest of the world.
The call for entries to the CAP Prize 2024 will open on 7 November 2023.
Utilising family archives and their images, Yassmin Fort’s photographs traverse the strands of family, migration and the history of Africans.
“I try to investigate how Africans have become as a result of mixtures, migrations and colonisations, mixed histories and repeated patterns and thus unravel my own African identity,” she explains.
About the technique used, photographic collage, Yassmin Forte justifies that it is to emphasise history “sometimes family images are superimposed on scenes of modern and remembered Mozambique, juxtaposing past and present. I used collage to construct a past and the perception of my own identity.”
Yassmin Forte was born in 1980 in Quelimane, Zambézia, Mozambique. She lives in Maputo.
https://www.instagram.com/yassminforte_photos/
This is a story about my family, 2022
My parents fell in love on a dance floor in Quelimane, Mozambique.
He was stationed at the height of the Portuguese occupation of Mozambique, part of the armed forces, and my mother was a local Mozambican woman.
He was destined to return to Portugal.
With independence in 1975, the Frelimo Party (The Front for the Liberation of Mozambique) ordered the Portuguese to leave the country within 24 hours.
He stayed and fell in love.
My images attempt to dissect and navigate the effects of colonialism and migration from my family’s history. It addresses three aspects, family, migration and the story of Africans, using family archives and my images. I attempt to investigate how Africans have become the result of mixtures, migrations and colonisation, histories mixed and patterns repeated, and in this way, unpack my own African identity.
The collage exaggerates and emphasises this history; at times, family images are placed on top of the scenes from modern and remembered Mozambique in juxtaposing past and present. I used collage to construct a past and the perception of my own identity.
Source: Maputo Fast Forward / CAP Prize The Contemporary African Photography Prize
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