Fragments of Memoreis by Famo Musa
Starting on February 10th, 2021, You Belong Here will house an installation by local leader, artist, and photographer, Famo Musa. The showcase is entitled Fragments of Memories. We want to share more with our audience regarding the process of creation, inspiration, and working within the Civil Liberties Fellowship, a program sponsored and taught by The Aja Project.
Artist Statement: Preservation-Fragments of Memories
by Famo Musa
Photography has always been something that I love to do, then I found out that I could make it into a career, and it was the best decision I ever made. The best part is working on multiple projects and sharing them with my community. For this project, I decided to collaborate with my mother and help tell her story. Throughout my projects, I have always focused on my family and my community, and this time I wanted to include storytelling. While looking through the archives of the Japanese Internment Camp, I focused on the tasks they did throughout their day and how they brought their talent and put it to good use. They made the camp their home and I wanted to focus on the themes of family, memories, preservation, and storytelling. I related their experiences to my mother, how she was relocated multiple times and had to make a new place home every time.
It was hard to put all the concepts together, the idea got modified a lot throughout the progress of the project. I finally settled on recreating her safe place, which is her bedroom, and how she makes this place sacred. I used her fabrics that she made to decorate the room. I also included a projection of our old family photos and the photos I found in the archive to be projected on the wall next to the bed. The final piece of the project is for the audio of her story to play around the room, maybe project it out the street where people can hear it while walking by. Even though this project is different from my previous ones because it’s not dependent on photography. It is a meaningful project that allowed me to hear about my mother’s deep wounds that she had kept hidden for over a decade. It was emotional and raw and I’m glad I got to hear her story of the homes she grew up in, and she got to get some of it out.
About The Artist
Famo Musa was born in Somalia and raised in Kenya. She is a photographer and a Youth Organizer with the Global ARC. She is one of the co-founders of City Heights Youth for Change (CHYFC), a youth-led organization, advocating for youth in City Heights. Famo is a community leader that has been active in her community for the past 10 years, she advocates for youth and helps parents who are not familiar with the educational system. She also works as a Teaching Artist at the AjA Project and does Poetry and Creative writing on the side. She is currenting going to University of California San Diego for Literature in writing. Famo has been a photographer for the past ten years, she does documentary and portrait photography with the emphasis of preserving memories within her Community
About The Civil Liberties Fellowship
The Civil Liberties Project is a competitive fellowship operating as both a dialogue and production space that explores the socio-political context through which we defend and celebrate our civil liberties. The fellowship looks to engage young adults in their transition from high school, building their learning path and looking for guidance in exploring topics of humanities and the arts. Through examining archives and their relationship to community histories, we will investigate race, class, gender and sexuality. Fellows will engage in readings, discussions and presentations to make connections to civil liberty violations, such as Japanese American incarceration, voter suppression, police brutality and liberation movements, transnational effects of the Migrant Protection Protocols program, and LGBTQ rights and incarceration. Fellows will be guided to explore and experiment with art forms as a way to interrogate history. We will consider the archive as a generative space and together ideate alternative archiving models and socio-historical art practices. The cohort will build upon personal explorations to create a multimedia online archive and corresponding public interventions that invite audiences to engage with community histories.