The Art World: What If…?!, Season 3, Episode 5 with Nana Oforiatta-Ayim
re is never just one way of seeing. And Nana Oforiatta-Ayim—writer, filmmaker, cultural historian, and institution builder—has spent her career proving exactly that.
For Oforiatta-Ayim, who founded the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge in Ghana and curated the country’s critically acclaimed first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019, art is not sealed off in white cubes but alive, porous, and connective.
In this episode, she opens up about the journey from proving worth to claiming inherent value in conversation with host Charlotte Burns. She speaks about the victories and challenges of her groundbreaking projects, including the Mobile Museum—which brings art into kiosks on street corners and tours it through local communities—and the 54-volume Cultural Encyclopedia, which reorders and re-presents knowledge, narratives, and representations from across the African continent, the first of which launches this year.
Fifty years after critic John Berger cracked open the canon of art history with Ways of Seeing, Oforiatta Ayim is carrying the conversation forward with her own trilogy of books. She speaks candidly about reimagining Berger’s radical gesture for our time, reckoning with the limits of Western paradigms, and building from indigenous knowledge systems, oral storytelling, and the land itself.
What if the future of art looked more like a festival than a shrine?
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Transcript:
Charlotte Burns: Hello, and welcome to The Art World: What If…?!, the podcast that imagines new and different futures. I’m your host, Charlotte Burns.
[Audio of guests saying “what if?”]
There is never just one way of seeing, and Nana Oforiatta-Ayim has spent her career proving exactly that.
A writer, filmmaker, cultural historian, and institution builder, she founded the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge in Ghana and curated the country’s first, critically-acclaimed pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019.
In this episode, she reflects on the triumphs and challenges of these and other ambitious projects, such as the Mobile Museum, which brings art into kiosks and through local communities, and the 54-volume Cultural Encyclopedia of Africa—the first of which is launching soon.
Fifty years after John Berger cracked open art history with Ways of Seeing, Nana is carrying the conversation forward with her own trilogy—building from Indigenous knowledge systems, oral storytelling, and the land itself.
This is a conversation about people and their power to drive culture and to create change, to reshape how we understand ourselves, our worlds, and one another.
It also asks, what if the future of art looked more like a festival than a mausoleum?
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: Nana, thank you so much for joining us today. It is such a pleasure to be here in conversation with you. I'm so glad we've made this happen.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Me too.
Charlotte Burns: So, Nana, you are an art historian, a filmmaker, a writer, a cultural historian, an institution builder, and a community weaver. Which of those roles feels most central to your identity and your work?
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: I guess first of all, writing, or storytelling, is the one that is foundational to everything else; building narratives, and everything else comes out of that, or spins out of that.
Charlotte Burns: And you're in Lisbon right now, writing a book, aren’t you?
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yes.
Charlotte Burns: Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: What can I give away at this point?
ANO, my institution, is changing after about 20 years or so of being mostly focused on the arts. I've been thinking a lot more about legacy and what, if I were not to lead the institution, would happen, and how I might hand it on. And, in doing that, I've been thinking about what the thread of things is that I want to run through it.
With some of our projects that we've been doing, especially the Mobile Museum, we've been doing a lot of interacting and exchanging with community. And out of that, we've been going deeper and deeper into Indigenous knowledge and its contemporary expressions. And so I'm doing, actually, a series of books about Indigenous knowledge in Ghana; expressing them, codifying them, seeing how they can be a foundation for institutions, narrative building, and handing on of knowledge.
Charlotte Burns: Oh, is this related to, in about 2022, you were in Sienna on a residency, and you said that you wanted to focus on writing a book that was inspired by John Berger's Ways of Seeing that asked how could the paradigms that had been developed for over thousands of years, that had been very useful models, serve again as more inclusive and democratic models than the ones that had been imported wholesale from the West?
I really love the idea. I mean, John Berger's Ways of Seeing is such a foundational text.
Is that the same thing? Is that the same project?
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah, it is.
Obviously, John Berger was such a prescient, impactful, beautiful voice. Especially when things were in turmoil—and he had such wisdom. So, I'm actually working on that right now.
Charlotte Burns: No, that's so interesting.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah, yeah. And his book, obviously, is such an inspiration. It was a turning point. Art history, up to that point, had been very much a given that it was a patriarchal history of men, and painting, and all of these things. And I love the way he just broke that all open, and said, actually, there are different ways of seeing and different viewing points and different starting points, and put that all together.
In a way, the series of books that I'm writing is a daughter to what he started. He's one of my literary godfathers.
Charlotte Burns: Mm.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: And so yeah, very much this book is in a way taking on the baton of what he did. He was breaking open this idea that there is only one way of telling history or art history, and it's linear and it's male. And he opened that, so I'm taking on that baton and saying, “Well, this is one of the many ways of doing this.”
Charlotte Burns: That book was published more than 50 years ago, and that openness that Berger tried to bring has not always been embraced. There are periods of linearity and multiplicity that we've seen in the art world, and a kind of pushback as a throughline against that.
Where are you positioning your writing, and what's your audience? Because his audience was so big. It was people in the art world, but it was such a broad public, too. What is your audience, where are they, and what change do you hope to have?
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: That's the kind of question my agent would ask me!
[Laughter]
I'm like, “I don’t know, I’m just writing!”
[Laughter]
I think, I mean, similar to him, I would want it to be broader than just the art world. From the beginning of my working life, I've wanted to touch and reach people that are beyond the confines of the art world, especially the art world as we know it and as it's defined.
That's why I've done things like the Mobile Museum, which travels around towns and villages in Ghana that are really not part of the art world at all, and is inclusive of people that are everything from market women to fishermen, to literally every kind of person that you can think of. And so, ideally, what I'm writing would be similarly open to the public.
Obviously, I'm grappling with quite complex ideas and thinking of how to break them down. That's where, also, the storytelling comes in as well. A lot of the ways that we passed on knowledge traditionally was through storytelling, or through proverbs, or things like drum poetry, even things woven into cloth. And so there was a way of passing on knowledge and wisdom that wasn't necessarily just an academic tone, written in a way that only speaks to other thinkers and academics.
Charlotte Burns: I can't wait to read it. How far are you along? You say it's a series of books. How many books are in the series and what's the overarching structure that you can tell me about? Because I know it's not all revealed yet.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: As of now, I can say that it's going to be a trilogy. From all the research that we've been doing at ANO over the last decades, I've found that there are three principles within our Indigenous knowledge systems, the Akan—which are Ayan, Afahye, and Adae—and how I'm using them as foundational principles are ways of institution building, like how do we create institutions that are of this time?
Because obviously the museums as we know them, a lot of them, especially the encyclopedic museums, were imperialistic. They were so-called universal, but they were more or less from one point of view and not universal viewpoints. So, how do we create institutions of our time, and especially as I'm based in Ghana, for our context.
And then knowledge, how do we pass on knowledge, in ways that are, again, more open and pluralistic, and that come out of this grounding of the Indigenous knowledge that we've been researching.
And then the third is narrative.
Charlotte Burns: Hmm.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: How they pass on narratives.
I mean, I guess if you are looking at it from the academic point of view, it would be ontology, epistemology, institution building. I think that would be how you would describe it in the more Western traditional sense. But it's really looking at how do we build these new foundations backed up by research and not just saying we need new models, but don't quite know what those new models look like.
Charlotte Burns: Another guest on our podcast this season is Kemi Ilesanmi, who was talking about institution building on the Continent and those new models and what is happening and the urgency around that.
You founded ANO, which is the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge, in 2002. You said, when you founded it, that, “Ever since I started ANO, the aim was to create a space that I, and people like me, could exist in freely and exchange and interact. I almost can't believe this is what's happened; that from the beginning, I've been surrounded by [this family] and that I get to work alongside these smart, thoughtful, paradigm-shifting people.”
And you spoke recently about the ways in which the vision for it had shifted—or maybe more the practical applications of it—that when you first set it up, you said, “We didn't just have to be the creatives, we [had to be] the creators of our own narratives. [And] now, 20 years later, it's [even] bigger than that. It's not just that we have to be the creators of our own narratives; we also have to be the creators of our own structures and our own infrastructures. And then, not just of our own infrastructures, but of our own resources, too.”
And I wanted to ask you a little bit about that evolution for you, of those 20 years of creating a space where people could be and interact freely, to understanding that it was so much bigger than that. It was about building the entire ecosystem.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Mmm.
Charlotte Burns: And now to where you are, which sounds an even step further, which is thinking of the sustainability and the legacy of those spaces.
Can you talk us through that kind of evolution? And, I'm sure, the conflicts between how exciting that is and how possibly overwhelming that may feel at points?
[Laughter]
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah, I think the overwhelming comes first! Before the excitement.
[Laughter]
Woo. The evolution of that.
I think when I started this 20-odd years ago, I really didn't know what I was letting myself in for at all. I was very young, and it's strange to me now, looking back at young Nana, that I had the foresight to do the first exhibition that I ever curated under this umbrella of ANO. I never curated under “Nana”. I look back at young Nana and how ambitious she was in terms of, “This is gonna be a space, it's not just gonna be Nana curating this, but this will be some kind of collective space or space for us.” And not knowing how that was going to evolve and then, living in London and doing it internationally, and then moving back to Ghana—from the beginning, knowing that I wanted to create something that was of our context and really observing how there was quite a few spaces that were mimicking the white cube space of the West.
We had an art scene, which was very small at the time when I went back. It would be the same 100 or so people at each exhibition. I really wanted to break out of that idea of art or culture just being for a select few of people who are already erudite and cosmopolitan and knew about art. Especially because I'm from the rainforest area in Ghana and we have these [...] festivals. And there's thousands and thousands of all kinds of people that attend. People come back to their hometowns from the capitals. People fly in for them. There's so much art and culture there at hand, and everyone participates.
And so I'd already seen a model, at close hand within my context, which spoke to art and culture, and which was open, and which spoke to everybody and touched everybody and invited everyone in. So, I knew the model existed and I knew I didn't have to go very far to find it.
And somehow, something had got lost in translation between what we had established over thousands and thousands of years and what we were doing now in the contemporary, in the aftermath of the colonial encounter, in the aftermath of thinking what we needed to create in a contemporary sense needed to, in some way, mirror what was happening in the West.
Charlotte Burns: Mm.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: And so my question was how do I bridge that gap? How do I create something that, obviously is of now, is of the contemporary—I'm not engaged in a kind of nostalgic, how do we get back to the past. So, it's bridging that gap somehow of what was historically ours and what is contemporarily ours as well.
Charlotte Burns: Mm.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: And how do I do that? And this was a question.
And I feel quite blessed in a way looking back at the precarity of our infrastructure because, even though it was backbreakingly hard not having any kind of support financially, at the same time, it was a complete tabula rasa. There was nobody telling you, “Oh, you need a license for this. You need to fill out all of these forms before you do this”. You could basically do anything.
And so it was a blessing and a curse in terms of, it was very hard—and especially as a woman within a patriarchal art space in Ghana, we do have that as well. The art space is quite patriarchal. But the lack of support also meant there was the lack of limitations.
Charlotte Burns: Mm.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: And so I could really ask myself, what does this look like? What shape, what form does this take? And just take this quite meandering road of, “Let me try this. Okay, this works. Let me try this. Okay, this doesn't work.” I was able to fail and get up, fail and get up again and again, and try things and feel what worked, and what spoke to people, and what didn't.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: If you could sort of distill your learnings, which I'm sure is an overly reductive question, but what have you learned about the things that have been lost and what can be built in that place to bridge that gap?
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: I mean, the most surprising thing that I learned was not as much had been lost as I assumed it had. I assumed that the colonial encounter had been very successfully destructive. There was such an effort to eradicate our ways of being and knowing and believing, and replace them with Christianity and Western education, and to “civilize”, and that it had been systematic and therefore successful.
And so I started off, I think, with a grief of this loss. And the more that I traveled around the country, the more I spoke with everyday people, and encountered this knowledge embodied within people, the grief turned into joy and excitement of, “Wow, there's so much here. How do people not know about this? It's so alive, but it's so untapped!”
And so, that was the bridge for me, was realizing how rich and how present this was and how alive it was, but that it was just wasn't being translated into what we called the art world or what we thought of as our knowledge bank, in terms of creative knowledge, in terms of what we were leaning on.
And so that, for me, was the bridge, was just that discovery.
Charlotte Burns: You've just described moving around the country. That sort of peripatetic journey, is that what led you to the Mobile Museum?
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: It was a bit chicken and egg. And this is what I mean in terms of the experimentation was the journey. So, I really see ANO as being very much a process-led institution rather than an outcome-led one. People see the exhibitions, et cetera, and they talk about those. But for me, what happens in the in-between is almost more exciting.
I think it was the 2015 Chale Wote Festival, which is this big street art festival in Ghana. I had been asking this question of how do I create a space which is not intimidating, which invites in all different types of people, and I observed that on every street corner we had these, what we call kiosks, which are these makeshift little structures made out of wood and tin roofing. And, they're slapdash put together out of found materials. They are barber shops, they are mechanics, they are hairdressers, they're brick-a-brack shops, everything you can think of. Even like one-room hotels, anything you can think of is in a kiosk.
So, I saw this structure and I was like, “Well, why not have a museum in a kiosk?” Because obviously, the kiosk is not intimidating; it's on every corner. People can just walk in. It's not this big museum-like structure where people feel like they don't belong, or that it's not for them.
So, I decided to put a museum in a kiosk. I collaborated with an architect friend, DK Osseo-Asare, and we created this kiosk. And then I spent about a month going through the area where the Chale Wote Festival would be, which is Jamestown—which is an old fishing village, which is now in the capital of Accra—and I started gathering material culture, speaking to people, filming.
It was incredible. I was so blown away by the response. People were crowding into it. And people would be like, “Oh my God, there's my uncle”, because I'd filmed people doing things. There was so much excitement, so much emotion. At some point during the Chale Wote Festival, this guy, who's Samoa, who's a priest of the river, he came into kiosk and he's like, “In a minute, your kiosk will be a shrine. I'm going to come back with my people.” And I was like, okay. Then he said, “You will be the priestess of the shrine.” And I was like, “Okay”. And he said this very seriously.
And so he came back. He was all in white. They were doing a procession. He came with all his followers who were also all in white with chalk on them and leaves around their neck. And he came in with them and closed the door of the kiosk so none of the visitors could come in. And then he talked me through what I needed to do, which was he had a bowl of water. I needed to put my hands in the water and bless him three times.
So, the kiosk became this sacred space for the 30 minutes or so that this priest of the river decided for some reason that I was the one to bless him within this space and within this structure for that afternoon.
And I love that so much, that it was, and this has been the process with the Mobile Museum—wherever we've gone, people have co-opted it. So we've come with an idea of something that has been deconstructed by the very people that are of the place, and they have taken ownership of it and made it into theirs. And I love that openness and the flexibility.
I think it went from the “Kiosk Museum”, to the “Living Museum”, to the Mobile Museum, because then when I saw what it did in Accra, I thought, well, we can't just leave this Accra. This is so potent. Let's take it around the country and see, because also we learned so much in the process of it being in Accra.
Charlotte Burns: And that project is linked to the Cultural Encyclopedia, which is again, moving away from this idea of hierarchical knowledge systems and knowledge sharing.
Can you tell us a little bit more about the encyclopedia?
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah. The encyclopedia’s also, I feel like all my projects are really long-term [Laughs].
Charlotte Burns: And ambitious.
[Laughter]
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah.
Yeah. The end goal of the online encyclopedia is a 54-volume encyclopedia of the whole Continent, which is quite ambitious.
There was a couple of things I was inspired by. One was when I was little, we did used to have these, I think they were like brown, fake leather encyclopedias on our bookshelf. There was just lots of volumes. And I remember I used to take them down, and there was just such excitement about discovering the world. But obviously, Africa was not really included. It was a knowledge of the world, but the world being the Western world.
I think one of my first writing assignments was writing for an encyclopedia on mythology. And I was to do the African section, and it was literally African mythology in a few pages. And I was like, “Wow, the whole continent is being squeezed into this little space.”
And then, another inspiration was looking at [Denis] Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which was so foundational to the Enlightenment period, and which obviously changed the whole of Western thought. And I was like, “Wow, what if I could do that with African thought”, and have this space in which I can invite in all of these streams of thought, starting obviously with Ghana.
It's also something that's evolved over time. At the beginning, I would have these salons, I guess for want of a better word, or living archives, where I'd invite all of these thinkers from Ghana in to think together. So, different types of people, and then document and record that. And then also asking questions of what should be the languages? What is this knowledge, how does it look?
And so at the beginning, it was this experimental phase of bringing people together in co-thinking. And then we started this fellowship process, where, alongside all the written and known knowledge that we were gathering, and also the creative knowledge, we then started using the Mobile Museum. We were learning things as we were going, and so we were like, we need to document this because this is not accessible to most people.
And so it became this multi-layered archive of what was already in some way documented and then creative new knowledge, but then also this new-old knowledge that we were discovering as we were traveling around the country.
We've got the Ghana encyclopedia ready. I think we're gonna launch the beta version. We've had lots of different beta versions, but we're gonna launch the final—and I hesitate to say final because I feel like nothing is ever final—later this year.
Charlotte Burns: Oh, wow. Congratulations.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Thanks.
Charlotte Burns: What are the kind of challenges or breakthroughs that you've encountered in this 54-volume encyclopedia? And, again, this project's so massive, it's one of these things that you must think about sustainability and lineage and legacy. How do you manage it? How do you ensure its maintenance, in a kind of ongoing capacity.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: I think from the beginning I saw it as a lifetime project, and not just my lifetime, but other people's, if they're interested or want to pursue it.
The most important thing to me was getting the first volume, that we tried everything that we could possibly try with the Ghana volume, because that's where I had some element of control. Once it goes out to other countries, I'm not going be the one there on the ground doing the Mobile Museum and not going be the one gathering research. And so it becomes an unknown quantity. It becomes something that is of itself, in the same way that Samoa came in and made a museum into a shrine, we don't know what's gonna happen once it travels to other countries.
I think we spent about 10 years trying everything we could possibly try out in the Ghanaian context. And, now, feeling like the Ghanaian encyclopedia is as robust as we can make it because we've tried so many things and asked so many questions of it. It's almost like the encyclopedia itself is a living thing that we were in conversation with and it's told us now, “I'm ready to go out into the world”.
And it's funny because when we went on the first tour with the Mobile Museum, I said this thing to the team where I was like, “We're gonna let the sunsum lead us.” And in Twi, our Akan language, sunsum means spirit, and everything has spirit like, the trees and the rivers and paper and everything within Akan tradition. Sunsum is the living—I guess in Asian culture it’d be like qi, the living spirit that is in all things. And if you listen, sunsum will guide you, the spirit of all things that is in us and is in everything will guide you.
And so, I said this trip, isn't it, we do have like our ideas of when we're gonna be where, but it's very much that we're gonna let the sunsum guide us. So, we would see things on the side of the road and we'd be like, “Oh my God, look at this.” And we'd stop. And then we'd go in and behind the road, there'd be this traditional priest who would tell us…It was incredible in terms of being open to this spirit of discovery and being led by it. And so, I would say very much, so much of what we did was just listening, and letting that listening process guide us.
And by listening, I mean also listening to communities and letting them tell us what we should do next. And so yeah, I think the Ghanaian encyclopedia has come to a place where we feel ready to share it, and that we feel that what our intention was will be communicated in a way. Obviously, it's unpredictable how people respond, but I feel like there is a clear path from the kind of heart of our intention to what it looks like now.
As of next year, there's gonna be, I think, five countries every year where they'll come to Ghana and do workshops with us on methodology, of how we did the Mobile Museum, how we did the Cultural Encyclopedia. But then each of these different institutions will take on the encyclopedia for themselves.
And also the encyclopedia is something that's never going to be finished. We will have some published versions. I'm hoping they'll be quite cheap. You know how you have the exercise books that in Ghana they're sold at traffic lights and they look a bit like this, [shows Charlotte an example of an exercise book].
Charlotte Burns: Oh, yeah.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Like exercise books.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: And so I'm hoping that we will have versions of the encyclopedia that people can literally just buy at traffic lights, and in villages, and on squares. And there'll be, I think, more robust versions for libraries, and universities, et cetera. But I'm really hoping that the encyclopedia will just be something that people can buy for the amount that they would spend on a, I don't know, Coca-Cola or a snack or something, and that they can just have in their homes as a source of knowledge and inspiration.
Charlotte Burns: Will it also be digital?
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah, that's, sorry. The main encyclopedia will be digital.
Charlotte Burns: Right.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: The published ones is a…
Charlotte Burns: The physical.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yean, it's an online encyclopedia.
Charlotte Burns: I also wanted to talk to you a little bit about the technology behind this. You were one of eight people out of a pool of 400 applicants to receive the 2015 Art + Technology [Lab] award from LACMA, and I thought it was really interesting to think about how you were using technology in your work.
This idea, again, of bridging different traditions and moving into the future. You've said that the encyclopedia places technology at the core of a new forum of cultural knowledge and exchange. And I wanted to ask you how you think digital platforms can shape new narratives and new storytelling, and also how technology can serve culture in ways that center it rather than extract from it.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Hmm, such a good question. I'm doing a project right now with one of my colleagues and a peer, Chao Tayiana, who has a Digital Heritage Africa platform, and we have been speaking a lot about how do we respond to what's happening right now, with what's happening in Sudan, Congo, Kenya, Palestine, in terms of voice, in terms of who gets heard, who gets to be visible, and also the incongruence that we are watching genocides, massacres in real time, and yet can't really do anything about it. And what does that mean, in terms of, like, where we are digitally in this time? So, we've been thinking a lot about these questions of digital platforms and their resonance and what they do and what they can't do and what their limitations are in response to what's happening around us, which feels so, yeah, I don’t if I have the word for it.
Charlotte Burns: Horrific.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah. Yeah.
So, in terms of what they can do, I feel like everybody has access to technology in some form or other. In places like Ghana, we skipped the analog phase of phones, and went straight to mobile phones. There's almost this kind of technology leapfrogging that's happened, which I think is really interesting and potentially generative.
There are internet cafes in every village, so if you don't have a mobile phone, or you don't have a computer, you can go to an internet cafe and look at a computer. We do still have the what we call Yams. Yams is like a tuber or that is similar to a potato, which it doesn't have WhatsApp and all of those other things.
Charlotte Burns: Oh yeah. Yeah. Pre-everything. Pre-do-everything phones.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah. Yeah.
Some people still have Yams, but I would say a majority of people who have phones at least can use WhatsApp, look at their social media, et cetera. So, it is something that has, for better or worse, democratized access and information and knowledge. Instead of using it as so many social media platforms do as something that just sucks the energy out of you, thinking of it in the opposite stream of things. How can we use it as a tool of coming together?
And if there is a little boy in a village at the outskirts that dreams of being an architect, he can easily access a platform where he can look at how architecture was created in Ghana for centuries and how that then connects with how it was built in Mali or in Kenya, and see how contemporary architects have taken on this Indigenous site and he or she can start to create building blocks for themselves.
We’re also trying to build in community aspects within the platform as well, so people can speak to each other, people who have similar interests. So, the idea is for it to be as inclusive as possible and also as enabling as possible, primarily for people on the African continent and the diaspora.
And that brings me to your question about extractivism, because as we all know African culture has been used all over the world as a foundational block. It's very similar to what happens with our material culture in which the raw materials are taken out and then refined elsewhere, and then imported back to us. It’s quite a similar thing with culture.
I mean, you've seen it all over the world, whether it's with jazz or blues or rap or fashion, dance, food, anything, you name it. You can go across the world and see some elements of African culture that have somehow been morphed into something and then import it back into the African culture at a much, much higher price point than they were taken away.
Obviously, I'm in Lisbon at the moment. A lot of people are here from Western countries. What's interesting about the Western people that are coming here is, first of all, they're not calling themselves immigrants. They're calling themselves expats, which is a whole ‘nother conversation, but it's an interesting moment. It feels like this kind of post-capitalist moment where people don't want to be part of the rat race anymore and are looking for something else. They are drawing on Indigenous cultures in terms of, I don't know, sweat lodges. Like all these things that have been evolved and developed in Indigenous culture and using like these shorthand ways of, I dunno. I'm gonna do a cacao ceremony this afternoon, and it's really fascinating that people are extracting these quite deep and layered and sacred elements of cultures and saying, I want to take this on for myself, for my own well-being and betterment, but without all the necessary steps of relationality and accountability and reciprocity that are actually part of the process or the context from which they were taken from.
And so, that's been a really big question with the encyclopedia because once I started doing it, at some point, I gave an interview to the New York Times, and it went really big talking about the Cultural Encyclopedia. People were so excited about the idea of it, and I wasn't in any shape or form ready at that point to take on all of that response, because we were still so much in the process. I needed to be in the shadows of still working on it. But, what it told me was, “Wow, there's such a hunger for this kind of knowledge in a way where it's all brought together.”
But what it also made me do is feel a bit wary of, well, when we put all of this culture out, all of this knowledge, how do we protect it in a way that it isn't taken on in this really superficial, really trendy, yeah, just, that's just paying lip service to something that we are actually presenting as something quite sacred.
Charlotte Burns: How do you protect that? Because, I guess this is linked to the concept of restitution, which you've said is not just about objects coming back. It's about repair, it's about healing. It's emotional work, and it's spiritual work.
I know that as you have been doing work with the next phase of ANO, you've been thinking about the farm and the school in the Aburi mountains, which is this idea of also creating a space of respite.
How do you protect the knowledge that you are helping to generate?
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Ooh. Yeah, I mean, I do prefer the concept of rematriation to that of restitution. Rematriation is this concept that was developed largely by Indigenous women. I feel like the restitution or repatriation debate got co-opted quite a bit by the kind of systems that it was looking to overturn, which are imperial and patriarchal, and still very much trying to define what should happen.
There were a lot of Western museum directors and academics who were saying this is how it should happen, and were speaking on behalf the African counterparts without ceding voice or platform to them. I mean, I was quite involved in a lot of those dynamics and I found it quite a troubling one.
Charlotte Burns: Mm-hmm.
I know that you have been very closely, intimately involved in a lot of the return of objects that were so violently looted from Ghana by colonial forces, and so I want to ask you about rematriation, but also how your own sort of position has changed.
You wrote recently that it had somewhat softened. In 2024, when the British Museum and the V&A announced the temporary return of Asante items, you were asked to comment by the BBC, and you wrote about it saying, “Of course, a temporary return is not a solution far from it. But over the years, my drive towards total healing as soon as possible has softened into doing one's best and meeting each day with solutions that day needs whether these are radical or more hedgingly diplomatic.” And you said, “I can no longer expect to do everything in my lifetime to heal all of our deep wounds of separation, but I will continue to take steps every day towards this. Through one of our knowledge systems, I learned that in order to attain knowledge, you need to uncover your own mysteries, i.e. that the work of the collective is simultaneously an act of self,” which I thought was really lovely in a different voice really on the entire conversation of returning of objects.
Can you expand on that a little bit?
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah, part of it is just a natural process of getting older.
[Laughter]
When you are young, you come in with such energy and “I can do all this”. My whole aim when I was younger was like, “I'm going to create a cultural revolution and I'm gonna do it all and I'm gonna do it now.” And then you get tired. [Laughter]
You can, you get tired. I mean, I think also I had a huge, whew, huge learning curve. I did the two Ghana Pavilions for the Venice Biennale. I did the very first pavilion in 2019, and then I did the second one in 2022. And I was very ambitious with what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it. I remember years ago when I was first starting out, I'd gone to the Venice Biennale and there was an African Pavilion. A whole continent squished into what? A few rooms, and it was miles away from the center of where all the kind of “important” countries were.
At that point I was like, “One day I'm going to do a Ghana Pavilion and it's going to be right at the center where everybody else is and it's going to be incredible”. And I remember just saying that to myself at the age of, I don't know, 21. And so, the 2019 one was a full cycle moment of that, and I managed to do it in the Arsenale, which is where all the “important” countries were.
The first one was a huge hit. It was in all the top three, must see pavilions. It was a really overwhelming experience, and then came the second one, which I wanted to do in order to lay the groundwork for others to do it because you need really a particular skillset in order to be able to do it, and I wanted to really codify that, put that all down so that whoever came next could do it because you needed to be locally embedded, but you also needed an international network. You needed to be able to navigate politically and diplomatically, like there were so many different skill sets.
I was like, “Let me do it once more so that I can actually do a kind of handbook of how it's done for anybody who wants to do it afterwards”. But then a month before the opening, the government defaulted on all payments. Everyone that we had brought on board. I'm still kind of living with the reverberations of that two, three years later. But talk about a wake up call or a rock bottom moment. I was suddenly left with having to pay hundreds of thousands of euros. I mean, I didn't have to, it wasn't my duty, it was a Ghana National Pavilion, but all of the people who had come on, literally everybody had come on because of my relationships with them, because of people that I'd known for 20 years.
I couldn't say to them, “Sorry, our government says no. This huge work that you've done is going to go completely unrewarded or unacknowledged or unvalidated.” That was a real, I don't, yeah, I don't quite have the words for how hugely disruptive, and what a huge thing that was to carry.
We had, in a way, reached the pinnacle of what we were trying to do in terms of the art world. Like the first 2019 Ghana Pavilion had a lot of repercussions in Ghana. Suddenly all of the galleries wanted to come to Ghana and see the museums, et cetera. So, the visibility of the 2019 Ghana Pavilion had real world repercussions in terms of what happened in Ghana. But what I realized was that those repercussions weren't necessarily the ones that I had foreseen, in that now, suddenly Ghanaian art was being valued at hundreds of thousands. We were, like, at the top, temporarily, of the art market. I could quite clearly see that it was a bubble, that it wasn't really built on anything slow and foundational. That, at some point, what went up so quickly would also come down.
Yeah, it was a big eyeopener that achieving your dream, or getting to the top of what you had wanted to get to the top of when you felt like you were at the bottom was not necessarily all that it looked from down here. That was a huge, it was a very humbling experience, in that, yeah, this kind of drive that I'd had an ambition of what I'd wanted to do with culture and Ghana and what I wanted to prove, and all of that kind of dissipated, and turned into something else.
There was much more of an appreciation of the process of the little encounters that we had with everyday people, because looking back, those have been the most nourishing and enriching. It was like, well, how do we actually maintain these processes of care and of intentionality and of reciprocity and all of these things that are actually quite foundational to Indigenous knowledge systems. How do we maintain these? And the answers were in something slower, not as bombastic as what I had imagined when I first came into this. That it didn't have to be like, ta-da, now and big and, yeah, all of these, tap dancy and blowing everything up. It didn't have to be that way.
I was literally at rock bottom being like, how do I pay back all these hundreds of thousands of euros? And it deconstructed something so fundamental in me because there was nowhere for me to go and I had to really look into what am I doing? How am I doing it? And how is something that I had such good intentions for, how did it spectacularly blow up in my face so much? And how do I go forward in small ways, in ways of care, not just for others, but also for myself? Because I was going at such speed and such single-mindedness that I was missing things.
There were a lot of flags, like when I look back on it now, that foreshadowed what was gonna happen. But I was so single-minded that I didn't pick up on those. So, in a way, I think the process of rematriation as well is going back to this idea of being slower and more intentional and more care driven for ourselves, for each other, and not being in this huge, bombastic, linear, achievement-driven path.
Charlotte Burns: It sounds horrible. Sounds like such an awful thing to go through.
You're laughing as you talk about it now. Are you on that side of it or is it still a painful thing?
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Both, I would say. Both because, as you can imagine, it's unbelievably difficult to fundraise for something retroactively.
If the government had told me a year before, we cannot pay for this thing, it would've been a lot easier for me to fundraise than them telling me a month before, and having to fundraise during and after the event.
So, I'm still in that process now. I don't know. There's something almost quite, I guess, spiritual about coming through the other side of this, letting go. I was so angry. I felt so betrayed. I spent so many days in government offices like walking up and down and being lied to, and being told it's coming. There's something, yeah, about coming out of that and letting go of the blame and the victim “why, is this happening to me?” Like all of that, just letting go of it and being like, okay, this is a really big thing. I'm still going through it. It's still hard, but also, it's allowed me to connect with the truth of something really essential of why it is I'm doing this. I feel like we can get into a like hamster wheel, and we externalize the idea of what achievement and success is, and don't come back to the core of what it really is in a meaningful way. When something like this happens, that's so big and so unmanageable, it really stops you in your tracks because there's nowhere to go from there.
So, it makes you turn inwards in a way that you wouldn't normally. I could have easily kept going on, I wanted to build this huge museum and do this, and do that and had all of these plans, and I just had to stop and shut everything down. I've gone from seeing it as this curse, to a gift of being able to start again in a way was much more truthful. I was very going at very fast pace and allowed me to stop in a way that I never would've voluntarily.
Charlotte Burns: That is really profound experience to go through and to talk about so openly as you are is amazing. So, thank you for sharing that with us.
[Musical interlude]
I was thinking about how we began this conversation, which was with you writing and thinking about ways of seeing and remembering something that had come across in research for the show, that the idea for ANO had come to you on a winter's evening in Russia, where you were living for a year. You've talked about how when you were growing up, you spoke three languages, but you said you never felt fully Ghanaian. You never were fully German, you never felt fully English. When you were growing up in Germany, people would speak to you first in English because of the color of your skin. They felt that you didn't belong and that Ghana is where you most obviously belong, but you'd felt so strongly this amnesia of knowledge. The way you expressed that lack was that you said, “I can't just go to the library and pick up a novel about Ghana in the same way I can pick up a novel of Russian 19th century life with Tolstoy”. So, it's interesting that the end of this sort of crisis that happened in Venice coming back to books again, after your search began there.
Is it fulfilling in a deeper way to be writing these books to be so engaged with words and filling that cultural amnesia?
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yes. I mean, I'm not quite there yet. Even now, as I sit down, I'm not quite in the emptiness of where you are when you are really writing and nothing is hindering your mind. I'm still dealing with the everyday stress of the Venice thing, so unfortunately, I can't say I'm in a place of complete peace and inspiration.
Charlotte Burns: No.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: I'm not quite there yet. Which is fine. That's life. I'm not in my early 20s anymore. I mean, it happens, right, to everyone. As you get older, things build up, the consequences of things build up. And that's where I am now.
But, when I started and I desperately wanted to connect with a part of myself that I felt I had no access to, this whole journey of doing that both individually and collectively, happened. And I feel like I am at a stage where I have managed to connect, and also gathered all of these tools of connection that I can now pass on to others.
It's been really enriching and really fulfilling. And if I can do that, what I'm doing at the moment, which is as truthfully as possible and as meaningfully as possible, pass on to others what it is that I've learned, then I feel like I've done my part in the world. And this is also what I get out of our fellowship programs is they're these young girls especially that were literally like me and they come and I can give them that space that I didn't have when I was in my early twenties. I can say, come and research and dive into this and we're gonna give you a space and we've got the funding and we can support you to think in this way, which is your own. But, also it's within the context of like-minded people that you can reach out your hand and touch. And they're all so brilliant, these young girls, and it's so exciting to me that I can provide that space for them. I can't even put it into words, the feeling of that.
And, I think, yeah, with what I'm writing at the moment is similar to what we're creating in the collective sense with ANO.
Charlotte Burns: It's so exciting to hear you describe that. It's very rare to interview someone who's so aware of moving through the stages of life, and where they are in that and what that means to be looking forward and passing things backwards.
I'm really struck by that in this conversation with you, and it brings me on to Koyo [Kouoh], who I know was such a big influence on you. And she proclaimed herself your big sister on the first day you met in 2008, which was also the year that she set up RAW Material Company. And you said, “on the second day, she said, let's go shopping, and took me across all the avant garde shops of Brussels. From the beginning she embodied a kind of permissive female leadership. And, her last message to you, you said was, ‘We shall deliver a Black fist of power’.” She was talking about Venice and her vision for it as with everything was surprising, unexpected, transcendent, everything, what was needed at this moment in time when there is so much unstoppable horror all around. She was about to share with the world what we knew of her all along.
It's so beautifully written, your tribute to her.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: I mean, it's still so abstract to me that she's gone because obviously we lived in different countries, so there's months and months that I don't see her, and then suddenly there she is.
What do I say about Koyo? When I first met her, it feels almost like a completely different time, in the African art world, it was much smaller. There was no money in it at all. You'd go from the Dak’Art Biennale to something else, and it was a family because everybody who was there and who was doing it out of real love for what they were doing. And so there was a lot of care whether it was from Koyo or Bisi Silva, or even [...], it was very much like big sister, big brother. I was young when I came into it.
And, Koyo, like I said in that post, she immediately [Laughs] just declared that she was my big sister. I was her little sister. She put that hierarchy in place immediately [Laughs] and I just had to go with it.
[Laughter]
She defined it from the very first day.
When my mom died and I wanted to go home to Ghana, but I wasn't quite ready to because it was a Ghana without my mom there. She just was like, come to RAW for a year. Help me write these books and edit them, and this will be your way back into the Continent. She gave me this very safe space of not just nurture, but also of thinking.
When I went back, it was the first Condition Report’s conference, which brought together all these independent art spaces from all across the world. And it was happening in Dakar, and it was really at the cutting edge of what is art, what is curating, what does it mean for us all to come together? What do these spaces represent in the world? All of these conversations. She gave me something that was so generative, she gave me a place in the world, both rooted in the earth and of the sky because it was like rooted because she gave me home and care and I'm vegetarian and Dakar is not at all, made sure there was always vegetarian food for me.
So, that nurtured that care, but also the kind of more celestial space of thinking and creating, and it was really special. And I don't know if I appreciated enough because for me I always thought it was always gonna be there, like conversations with Koyo. It spanned everything from work to love to everything. Those conversations, they're the ones that you need in life, right? They root you into yourself and they provide you an external, kind of witnessing of self.
Charlotte Burns: They sort of root you in who you are and allow you to think about where you might go.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah. And she did that not just in the personal, but in, we were both navigating, as women, these mechanisms of power. And I think it's not something that we talk about very often is that other journey that we have to navigate.
There's, yes, there's a creative aspect—the curating and the writing and everything—but that navigation of the mechanisms of power, which again, are very patriarchal still. And being a woman within that, navigating it both locally within your context, which is one thing, then the whole ‘nother one of doing it internationally, which comes with patriarchy and racism as well.
And, to be honest, I don't know if anyone else within my world that really understood what that was like and what it was like to navigate. So, there was a real, something in having Koyo and also, yeah, in her brilliant, beautiful mind, and her strength. She was a force and a power and I just can't believe that she went literally just before she was just about to face outwards into the world with who she was. It's just, it's astounding to me. You know, of course she would've been amazing. She would've dressed in the most fabulous way and gathered everybody and had a ball. I mean, I guess if you are spiritually inclined, you try and make sense of it because the timing was really so crazy.
But Bisi Silva and Okwui Enwezor.
Charlotte Burns: Mm-hmm.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Okwui died when he was advising us on the 2019 Pavilion. Bisi was a also a very close friend and mentor, and all three of them died in their 50s, at the pinnacle, at the height, of this path that they had been walking. Artistic director of the Venice Biennale as a first African woman. All of us in the African art world, it gave us all pause of what are we doing this for? This rat race, this burning out. I remember Bisi was just like we all were or are like burning out constantly, worrying constantly about resources and funding and sustainability and Koyo carrying this institution and Okwui as well, fighting the very racist German cultural landscape.
And at some point, like especially when you see the very real world repercussions of this kind of constant struggle on all of these different fronts, the cost of it is very real because those of us who really succeeded in this real world way didn't survive it, didn't survive the success of it.
And so, I think, yeah, for us and even the younger generation, it's really giving pause of what are we doing this for and how are we doing it and what are the costs and are they worth it?
Charlotte Burns: Thank you so much for sharing that, Nana.
How for you, right now, does that change the way you are thinking about your work and life and practice?
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: I think that I had already, before Koyo’s passing, I had already had this big rock bottom that had made me question my pace. Since going to Ghana, I've had a burnout, and then I've had to build myself up and recover without fail every single year. I've been aware of it for a long time and been like, this is not a sustainable way to live. At some point, I'm not gonna recover from this constant, constant cycle.
Charlotte Burns: Right.
Yeah, I mean, maybe in the bigger sense it is this question of moving with more care—especially because a lot of my work moving forward is gonna be with young people—is giving them the opening of you don't have to do it in the same way that we did. You don't have to do it in this backbreaking way, that it's not the only way. Opening up in a way these other ways of being, which fits into what I'm writing about now.
The really exciting thing is connecting also with other Indigenous thinkers and writers from very different contexts, whether it's like Siberia or America or Canada or Tonga, and that we're all reflecting on how do we move forward in a way that honors not just ourselves, but the earth and our relationships and all of this.
And can we, in a world that is crumbling, can we create these spaces within that?
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: So, Nana, before we round out the show, I'm gonna ask you a couple of ‘what ifs’.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah.
Charlotte Burns: You've previously said that the art world paradigm is one that's way too narrow right now. What if you could redesign a different paradigm?
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: [Laughs]
Charlotte Burns: What would you do? What would be your non-negotiables?
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Gosh. I think it wouldn't be a world that was cut off from everything else. It would be one that exists within interdependence of all things.
You were talking about the farm earlier on in the school. That's one thing that I love, that we can plant a healing garden and that it's all part of that. Art isn't in a capsuled off art world, but that it's just one other branch of the tree of life.That it's not this white cube capsuled off world, it exists more in interdependence with all things.
Yeah.
Charlotte Burns: What if museums were more than art? You've said, “I think the future museum is one that encompasses way more than just art.” I know you were just talking about that a little bit.
Can you expand on it? What is beyond the white cube, in a museum context? And I'm specifically saying here, maybe what isn't in the museum, based on, in around 2010 you worked in the British Museum, and I know that formed a lot of your thinking around what you didn't want to do in museums.So, what if we were talking about the things that weren't in museums or the things that museums didn't do? What if museums were different?
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: I can answer that by an example. I'm working right now on an eco-museum in the Atiwa rainforest. It's a rainforest where I'm from, and our starting point, even before the structure goes up, is the community.
So, we're having all of these makeshift Mobile Museum meetings and inviting people from the community in and asking and listening. And we're doing that for a year, at least, before we even think about what does the museum look like. It's also really amazing how people open up when they're asked what they want in their opinions. At the beginning, people are a bit suspicious saying, “What do you want from us?” And how much people light up and how much they have to say when you give them a platform to be heard and listened to.
So, I'd say that for me is the biggest starting point, bringing in the people who, in a way, are most affected by it, because they live there. It's a space made of people, first of all, and then also made of the land.
So, in Ghana, we still do, actually, when something is built on land, we pour libation onto the land and we ask in a way the spirit of the land. She's called Asasse Ya in my language. If she's okay with being built on. Trees that are chopped down. You also ask the spirits of the tree if they bless you in chopping them down.
So, we're doing a lot of that and not just doing it in a kind of lip service way, but really working with the knowledge keepers who have dedicated their life to listening of the spirit of these things. And so, in listening, not just to people, but also the land and the elements that are going to also be affected by what you do.
Charlotte Burns: What is the ‘what if’ that gets you out of bed in the morning and what is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night?
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: [Laughs] The ‘what if’ that gets me out of bed right now is…Sorry, sorry. Sorry, got distracted by mosquito. I'm so sorry.
Charlotte Burns: Maybe that's the one that keeps you up at night.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: [Laughs] Okay. Sorry. ‘What if’ that gets me outta, I think it's the joy of, like my little dog, and the people in my life, like I have really, yeah, the love of the people that I have in my life, and that joy of just getting to breathe and be here, and feeling grateful for that, I think.
And being able to, yeah, use my mind and my abilities to see what I can do in the world. Yeah. And how that can connect with people.
Charlotte Burns: Is that the one that gets you out of bed? What's the one that keeps you up?
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: I mean, not so great. It's like worrying. It's worrying about this money thing with Venice, how I'm gonna resolve that.
The amount of work that I have [Laughs] and all of the different things that I need to do and finish. Yeah, like sometimes the magnitude of things in the world. Yeah.
Charlotte Burns: Okay. Finally, one of our previous podcast guests, Kemi Ilesanmi, talked about you in her show as a sort of triumvirate of women on the Continent who had been rethinking culture—you and Koyo and Bisi Silva.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: I'm the only one left. That's really scary.
Charlotte Burns: Well, the next question is this idea of planting seeds. The idea is that, you are a slightly different generation, but all of three of you have been focused on planting seeds for the future.
And so, I wanted to ask you what if you were thinking, I know you very much are, about the future and the next generations? What advice would you give them?
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Hmm. yeah, I'm not quite sure I've reached where Bisi and Koyo are yet, because I think of them very much as like these aunties, like with the big hugs. I feel like I haven't quite, not quite at auntie status yet [Laughs]. Do you know what I mean?
Charlotte Burns: Yeah. They were mentors to you in many ways.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah. And I mean it's something in a way maybe that I strive
for, and maybe there are actually younger girls. Yeah, maybe there are actually younger girls who'd say that I am that for them.
What advice would I give them?
Charlotte Burns: Yeah, what advice would you give them? What would you wish for them?
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: First of all, take it easy, and don't be in such a rush. Breathe. And then what I say to a lot of young people, including artists, is a lot of the time we think the value is on the outside of us with institutions and we're striving and working towards those things. And I always say to them, remember that the value is in you and that to not in a way see, especially the Western institutions that a lot of people work towards and strive towards, that they're not the end goal. That there's something within them that is much more precious than that, and to live into the preciousness of that and to see it and recognize it, and, in a way, polish it.
And that out of that place of living fully into their value, they will take the right next steps. That it's not that there’s something external to them that they need to keep working towards and that they need to live up to. I feel like that's how I started off was that I had to prove myself, as an African, and as a woman, I had to prove that my culture was as valuable as that of the West. And I was very much operating from like this running place of having to show that I, and what I came from, was worthy, and as worthy as what, in a way, we were working towards. I'm not coming from that place anymore, but I would want the people coming after me to not even have to.
Charlotte Burns: Start from that place. Yeah.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: I'd want them to start from here, from where I am now basically. Yeah.
So, if I could help them leapfrog that place, which is the place I feel like the world still to, a certain extent, puts us in as women, as people of African origin, if we could see that as just a veil, as something that's not actually real, ontological, but just as something that's a category and connect with the thing that's real in themselves, which is of complete value, and start from that place, which is a loving place of self and of others, and of the work that you are doing. Then, I think you are starting from not the same place that maybe we started from.
Charlotte Burns: Nana, thank you so much for making the time to talk to me today. It's been such a pleasure to speak to you and I really appreciate you making the time.
Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Thank you.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: My huge thanks to Nana. There is so much we didn’t get to cover, including the courses for the launch of the Cultural Encyclopedia, which start this month on anoghana.org.
Next time we’re in conversation with Allan Schwartzman, talking about all things art market.
Allan Schwartzman: I think there's a certain resistance to reducing prices, but I do think for a lot of artists who were accustomed to having a show every few years and have it sell out and then have their prices rise somewhat conservatively year after year after year, they now find themselves out on the edge of a cliff with nowhere to go.
And so, I think while there's a huge resistance to reducing prices, a lot of artists and the galleries representing them would benefit from just taking a deep breath and doing some real sharp cutting of prices. One has to make the art accessible to a marketplace in order to support an artist.
Charlotte Burns: It’s a wonderful conversation. I can’t wait for you to listen.
This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman& and executive produced by Allan Schwartzman. The series is produced by Studio Burns with audio design by Tamsyn Kent. Follow the show on social media @schwartzman.art.