Postcard Philly, 2023
Silkscreen
Edition of 40
22 1/4 x 29 3/4 in
Collaborating Printers: Leslie Friedman, Gustavo Garcia, Rohan McDonald
Postcard Philly is an archive in the form of an image. Namibian artist Vitjitua Ndjiharine drew from the collections of the Library of Congress to assemble this densely layered composition, gathering documents, letters, stamps, maps, and illustrations from disparate sources and bringing them into conversation on a single surface. The work was made during her residency at Brandywine Workshop and Archives as one of the inaugural El Anatsui Fellows. At the center of the composition stand two figures in Herero traditional attire, grounding the work in a living cultural identity even as the materials surrounding them speak to the bureaucratic and cartographic machinery of history.
The silkscreen process suits the work well. Its layering of ink mirrors the layering of meaning, each element pressed onto the surface the way history presses itself onto people, accumulating over time into something that is difficult to read all at once and impossible to look away from.
The result is a meditation on what it means to arrive somewhere, to carry a history that is not recorded in the archives around you, and to place yourself, deliberately and visibly, at the center of the frame.
