Gladys Kalichini, a Zambian artist and art historian, explores how ritual can be used to remember. Specifically, Gladys has developed ritual performances to remember and honour the significant contribution of women to the decolonial revolutions in Zambia and Zimbabwe in the 1960s. Motivated to redress the lack of state-led public commemoration for these female freedom fighters, Gladys conducted extensive research which uncovered links between revolutionary organisations such as the Women’s Leagues and contemporary women’s church groups. The women in these church groups regularly honour their female forebears who fought for independence through collective ritual practices. In response, Gladys has created her own rituals that she performs in a wide variety of international contexts, in pursuit of her questions: ‘Where would the memory of liberation movements be stored? And how should they be remembered?’ This film follows Gladys’ preparation and performance of a ritual on Boon Wurrung Country, in which she invites participants to share their own memories while she washes their hands. For Gladys, these performances amplify the power of mnemonic practice. Gladys’ work reminds us that hidden histories may already be regularly commemorated, even if they are ignored or silenced by hegemonic powers.<p></p>
NTRO Output Category
- Original Creative Work : Visual artwork
Place
Naarm/Melbourne, Australia & Lusaka, ZambiaVenue
La Trobe Art InstituteNTRO Publisher
La Trobe Art InstituteMedium
4K video with soundResearch Statement
This film sits within the fields of contemporary art, decolonial feminist historiography, and performance studies. It investigates Zambian artist and scholar Gladys Kalichini’s embodied research into women’s participation in the struggle for independence from colonial rule in Zambia and Zimbabwe, and how these histories have been marginalised by official national memory. The research addresses the question of what form of remembrance is most appropriate for women’s histories in this context by honouring the way these stories are already remembered through community rituals. Through Kalichini’s re-performance and extension of these rituals, the work explores how ritual can operate as a form of public memory.
The work contributes new knowledge by theorising and demonstrating “mnemonic ritual” as an anti-colonial and feminist method of historical research and artistic practice. The film enacts this methodology through the way it follows Kalichini as she prepares a ritual on Boon Warrung country with careful engagement with Place, which included appropriate consultation. The film focusses on Kalichini’s gestures and her material process of creating a ritual that connects the stories of Zambian and Zimbabwean women freedom fighters to the specificity of Boon Warrung country and the memories of her participants/audience. In doing so, it reframes historical research as a process of embodied relation that links, sustains and creates political community internationally.
The research significance lies in the way its study and articulation of a situated feminist and anticolonial research method enables that method to become transversal and learned by others with shared purpose. The first exhibition of the work, as part of a dedicated exhibition for the broader project Storytelling Liberation, was staged at one of Australia’s leading university museums, La Trobe Art Institute (2025), and has since been approved for acquisition into their permanent collection.Size or Duration of Work
15:41Affiliation
Alex Martinis Roe, University of Melbourne
